L2 morphological processing of Korean nominal narker -ka: evidence from masked and cross-modal priming with advanced Chinese learners

Abstract

This paper reports results from masked and cross-modal priming experiments which investigate L1 and L2 processing of Korean nominal marker -ka in native speakers of Korean and advanced Chinese L2 learners of Korean. In both the masked and cross-modal priming experiments, partial priming effects were found for L1, and full priming effects for L2. The results indicate that L1 speakers of Korean make less use of morphological decomposition on the processing of the nominal marker -ka than Chinese L2 learners of Korean. The results that there was no difference between masked and cross-modal priming either in L1 or in L2 also indicate that the observed L1/L2 difference cannot be confined to either level of processing, at the early stages of form-level access or at the central level of lexical entries. (Konkuk University)