Abstract

This study investigated how L2 Korean advanced learners process regularly and irregularly inflected forms of Korean verbs, and whether this processing mechanism follows a single mechanism account or a dual mechanism account. In addition, it examined the effect of the learner’s working memory capacity on the reaction time or/and the accuracy rate in the chosen priming tasks. The patterns of facilitation on present tense verb targets were examined in three experiments. In the study, there were 72 participants with TOPIK level 6, who performed three lexical decision tasks with either a masked visual prime presented during 43ms (Experiment 1) or 230ms (Experiment 2) or an auditory prime (Experiment 3). Next, the priming for six different types of verbal inflections were compared: regular verbs with no orthographical or phonological changes, regular verbs with only phonological changes to their stem, regular verbs with only orthographical changes, irregular verbs with their stem omitted or alternated, irregular verbs with changes in their endings and irregular verbs with changes in both their stem and endings. The study found determined that (i) no priming effects in either regular or irregular inflections revealed in most conditions, which supports a single mechanism account, and (ii) the influence of working memory capacity of L2 learners showed as higher the working memory was, faster the reaction time was completed in those cases.

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