Abstract
Recent studies have suggested that proficient bilinguals show morphological decomposition in the L2, but the question remains as to whether this process is modulated by the cognateness of the morphemic constituents of L2 words and by L2 proficiency. To answer this question was the main goal of the present research. For that purpose, a masked priming lexical decision task was conducted manipulating for the first time the degree of orthographic overlap of the L2 word as a whole, as well as of their morphemic constituents (bases and suffixes). Thirty-four European Portuguese-English bilinguals (16 intermediate and 18 high-proficient) and 16 English native-speaking controls performed the task in English. Results revealed that both groups of bilinguals decomposed words as the native control group. Importantly, results also showed that morphological priming effects were sensitive not only to cross-language similarities of words as a whole, but also to their morphemic constituents (especially, suffixes).
Highlights
A number of studies in the monolingual domain across languages have shown that visual word recognition is guided by morphological information
In this paper we aimed to explore if non-native speakers of English with different degree of L2 proficiency showed morphological decomposition during the recognition of English derived words and, if so, whether or not morphological processing is modulated by cross-linguistic similarities of morphemic constituents
Both groups comprise 18 participants each, two participants from the intermediate group were not included in the final sample because of a high percentage of errors made during the experiment
Summary
A number of studies in the monolingual domain across languages have shown that visual word recognition is guided by morphological information (e.g., see [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]). A widely-used task to explore early morphological decomposition effects during lexical access is the masked priming lexical decision task (e.g., [4, 13,14,15,16,17,18,19]). In this task, an upper-case target word (e.g., PACK) is preceded by a lower-case prime for 50 ms or less, and participants are asked to decide whether the target is or is not a real word.
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