Long-lag morphological priming and inflectional paradigm size effects in Estonian and Finnish text reading

Morphological priming and paradigm size effects have been established in single word reading studies. Morphological priming effects have also been found in some sentence-reading studies, however, attempts to find priming effects in longer texts have failed. To our knowledge, paradigmatic effects have not yet been examined in text reading. The current study made use of the MECO corpus \citep{Siegelman:etal:2022} to explore paradigmatic and morphological priming effects in Estonian and Finnish, two morphologically rich Finno-Ugric languages. Unlike prior reports on Dutch, English and Spanish text reading, the current study showed clear long-lag inflectional priming effects. We also observed inflectional paradigm size effects for Estonian during text reading, but not for Finnish. These results suggest that inflectional variants of a particular word in Estonian and Finnish get and remain activated even when text context is present. However, effects of inflectional priming and paradigm size may be task- and language-specific. That is, they may surface only as cues when the support from an inflectional paradigm is semantically most beneficial for the reader.