Humanities & Social Sciences 1 (2017 10) 124-133 ~ ~ ~ УДК 81’23 Comma Effect in Reading Russian Sentences with Syntactic Ambiguity Mikhail S. Vlasov, Elena B. Trofimova and Ulyana M. Trofimova* Shukshin Altai State Humanities Pedagogical University 53 Korolenko Str., Biysk, 659333, Russia Received 29.11.2016, received in revised form 15.12.2016, accepted 11.01.2017 Do punctuation marks facilitate sentence readability? <...> In such studies the subjects deal with a specific pragmatic problem of relative clause (RC) attachment with complex noun phrase (NP) and choose early (N1 modification) or late (N2 modification) closure of ambiguous constructions in Russian. <...> Our experiment showed that the presence or absence of a comma on a RC boundary had different effects on individual interpretation strategies of a certain sentence as well as speech tempo in reading. <...> The experiment showed that the role of the punctuation factor in reading sentences in Russian with late closure prime was negligible. <...> Null prime generally facilitated early closure preference, but there were no significant differences in tempo pronouncing of sentence segments. <...> The experiment revealed gender differences in tempo pronouncing of N1 depending on the punctuation factor: females tend to read N1 slower than males. <...> Keywords: Russian language, syntactic ambiguity, relative clause attachment, early closure, late closure, priming, reading aloud, speech tempo, comma effect. <...> Introduction It is known that linguistic determinants of syntactic ambiguity in a Russian sentence are grammatical word forms, variants of lexical compatibility, omission of some sentence parts, word order, punctuation and other factors. <...> All rights reserved * Corresponding author E-mail address: vlasov_mikhailo@mail.ru; eltrofimova@mail.ru; umt2005@rambler.ru – 124 – on the material of Russian and English ambiguous sentences (Vlasov, 2008). <...> Syntactical disambiguation in languages of different structure is one of the most topical psycholinguistic problems. <...> Comma Effect in Reading Russian Sentences with Syntactic Ambiguity of the actress [N2] who was on the balcony) has been studied in a number of languages (Fodor, 1998, pp. 285-319), (Fedorova et al., 2007), (Hemforth et al., 2015). <...> It has been proved that the speakers <...>