Sensitivity to Inflectional Morphology in a Non-native Language: Evidence From ERPs

Caitlin E. Coughlin,Robert Fiorentino,Karsten Steinhauer,Phaedra Royle

doi:10.3389/fcomm.2019.00021

Caitlin E. Coughlin, Robert Fiorentino + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2019.00021

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Abstract

The extent to which non-native speakers are sensitive to morphological structure during language processing remains a matter of debate. The present study used a masked-priming lexical decision task with simultaneous electroencephalographic (EEG) recording to investigate whether native and non-native speakers of French yield behavioral and brain-level responses to inflected verbs. The results from reaction time and EEG analyses indicate that both native and non-native French speakers were indeed sensitive to morphological structure, and this sensitivity cannot be explained simply by the presence of orthographic or semantic overlap between prime and target. Moreover, sensitivity to morphological structure in non-native speakers was not influenced by proficiency (as reflected by the N400); lower-level learners show similar sensitivity at the word level as very advanced learners. These results demonstrate that native-like processing of inflectional morphology is possible in adult learners, even at lower levels of proficiency, which runs counter to proposals suggesting that native-like processing of inflection is beyond the capacity of non-native speakers.

Highlights

Specialty section: This article was submitted to Language Sciences, a section of the journal Frontiers in Communication
These results demonstrate that native-like processing of inflectional morphology is possible in adult learners, even at lower levels of proficiency, which runs counter to proposals suggesting that native-like processing of inflection is beyond non-native speakers’ reach
This evidence often comes from priming tasks, in which the presentation of an inflected word like “walked” facilitates the recognition of the stem word “walk.” Many priming studies have compared lexical decision latencies in morphologically related prime-target pairs to unrelated pairs and found facilitation from word pairs that overlap in morphology, but not in orthography

Summary

Introduction

Specialty section: This article was submitted to Language Sciences, a section of the journal Frontiers in Communication. An increasing body of electrophysiological evidence suggests that native speakers are sensitive to morphological relatedness between inflected words and their morphological stem (e.g., Stockall and Marantz, 2006; Royle et al, 2012) This evidence often comes from priming tasks, in which the presentation of an inflected word like “walked” facilitates the recognition of the stem word “walk.” Many priming studies have compared lexical decision latencies in morphologically related prime-target pairs (e.g., walkedWALK) to unrelated pairs (e.g., called-WALK) and found facilitation from word pairs that overlap in morphology, but not in orthography (e.g., sincere-SIN). Whereas unmasked priming methods (where the participants are aware of the prime word) often find robust influence of semantic relationships between primes and target words (e.g., MarslenWilson et al, 1994; Rastle et al, 2000), semantically-driven priming effects are typically absent in masked priming with short presentation times (e.g., Rastle et al, 2000, 2004; Longtin and Meunier, 2005; see references in Royle et al, 2012), suggesting that very brief prime exposure is not sufficient for semantic information to be accessed before target recognition takes place (cf. Diependaele et al, 2005; Morris et al, 2007; Feldman et al, 2009)

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