Abstract
The L2 decomposition of transparent derived verbs - Is it 'morphological'? A commentary on De Grauwe, Lemhöfer, Willems, & Schriefers (2014).
Highlights
Assume you come across a morphologically-complex Japanese word such as “ .” Even if you have absolutely no knowledge of Japanese at all, and are completely insensitive to the word’s morphological structure, you might still be able to distinguish between the stem “ ” and the affix “ .” This is because in Japanese, stems are typically written in Kanji, while affixes are written in Hiragana, with the surface form differences between these two scripts being distinct enough that they might even be noticeable for someone without any knowledge of Japanese
You might be able to “decompose” the word, but this decomposition process obviously does not operate on morphological units
How is this example related to De Grauwe et al (2014) study on morphological decomposition in non-native (L2) speakers? In their fMRI experiment, De Grauwe and colleagues convincingly show that L2 speakers of Dutch, just as native speakers, are able to decompose transparent derived verbs such as “opstaan” into the head “staan” and the modifier “op.” Based on these findings, the authors argue against accounts of L2 morphological processing which assume qualitative differences between native speakers and L2 speakers with regard to morphological decomposition
Summary
Assume you come across a morphologically-complex Japanese word such as “ .” Even if you have absolutely no knowledge of Japanese at all, and are completely insensitive to the word’s morphological structure, you might still be able to distinguish between the stem “ ” and the affix “ .” This is because in Japanese, stems are typically written in Kanji, while affixes are written in Hiragana, with the surface form differences between these two scripts being distinct enough that they might even be noticeable for someone without any knowledge of Japanese. L2 speakers decompose morphologically complex verbs: fMRI evidence from priming of transparent derived verbs by De Grauwe, S., Lemhöfer, K., Willems, R.
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