Morphological Representation Research Articles

Spherical and acicular representation of hydrates in a micromechanical model for cement paste: prediction of early-age elasticity and strength

Early-age stiffness and strength evolution of cement paste is studied in the framework of continuum micromechanics. Based on the self-consistent scheme, elastic and strength properties are upscaled from the scale of several micrometers up to the scale of several hundreds or thousands of micrometers. Four material phases are considered: clinker, hydration products, water and air. We assign a spherical geometry to clinker grains and pores, while we investigate both spherical and acicular (needle-type) shapes as geometrical representation of the micrometer-sized hydration products. As regards macroscopic poromechanical boundary conditions, two extreme cases are considered: drained conditions and sealed conditions, respectively. These choices allow for studying the influence of (i) the morphological representation of hydrates, and of (ii) the bulk stiffness of water, on the micromechanical prediction of early-age behavior of cement paste, including setting and the hydration-dependent evolutions of both elastic stiffness and uniaxial compressive strength. The newly proposed strength model is based on a von Mises-type elastic limit criterion for individual hydrates. Corresponding deviatoric stress peaks within hydrates are estimated through quadratic stress averages. In this way, the micromechanical strength criterion is formulated in terms of macroscopic loading (stresses or strains, respectively). Model-predicted elasticity and strength evolutions are compared with data from experimental testing of cement pastes with water–cement ratios ranging from 0.35 to 0.60. Satisfactory agreement between model predictions and experiments allows for two conclusions: the morphology of hydrates significantly influences micromechanics-based elastic stiffness estimates of cement paste particularly at very early ages, whereas elastic properties of mature cement paste can be estimated reliably on the basis of both spherical or acicular shaped hydrates. The development of a reliable strength model, however, requires consideration of hydrates as non-spherical particles, no matter what age of cement paste is considered.

Automatic acquisition of inflectional lexica for morphological normalisation

Due to natural language morphology, words can take on various morphological forms. Morphological normalisation – often used in information retrieval and text mining systems – conflates morphological variants of a word to a single representative form. In this paper, we describe an approach to lexicon-based inflectional normalisation. This approach is in between stemming and lemmatisation, and is suitable for morphological normalisation of inflectionally complex languages. To eliminate the immense effort required to compile the lexicon by hand, we focus on the problem of acquiring automatically an inflectional morphological lexicon from raw corpora. We propose a convenient and highly expressive morphology representation formalism on which the acquisition procedure is based. Our approach is applied to the morphologically complex Croatian language, but it should be equally applicable to other languages of similar morphological complexity. Experimental results show that our approach can be used to acquire a lexicon whose linguistic quality allows for rather good normalisation performance.

The pathological changes of the orbital tissue in thyroid associated ophthalmopathy

To study the morphological representation of the orbital tissue in thyroid associated ophthalmopathy. It was a retrospective case series. 138 specimens of TAO (include 77 specimens of orbital fat, 41 specimens of orbital periosteum and 20 specimens of lacrimal gland tissue) were analyzed by light microscopy and immunohistochemical staining. The notable hyperplasia of fat was found in orbital tissue from 73 of 77 and in lacrimal gland tissue from 12 of 20. The hyperplasia of fibrous tissue and muscular metaplasia were observed in orbital periosteum. The hyperplasia of fat in TAO orbital and lacrimal gland tissue is a very important and ubiquitous pathological changes. Study on the orbital fat and prevent against the hyperplasia of fat maybe have a significance of effective to hold back proptosis.

Morphological Transform for Image Compression

A new method for image compression based on morphological associative memories (MAMs) is presented. We used the MAM to implement a new image transform and applied it at the transformation stage of image coding, thereby replacing such traditional methods as the discrete cosine transform or the discrete wavelet transform. Autoassociative and heteroassociative MAMs can be considered as a subclass of morphological neural networks. The morphological transform (MT) presented in this paper generates heteroassociative MAMs derived from image subblocks. The MT is applied to individual blocks of the image using some transformation matrix as an input pattern. Depending on this matrix, the image takes a morphological representation, which is used to perform the data compression at the next stages. With respect to traditional methods, the main advantage offered by the MT is the processing speed, whereas the compression rate and the signal-to-noise ratio are competitive to conventional transforms.

Dilation-run wavelet image coding

The run-length coding and the morphological representation are two classical schemes for wavelet image coding. The run-length coders have the advantage of simplicity by recording the lengths of zero-runs between significant wavelet coefficients but at the expense of yielding an inferior rate-distortion performance. The morphology-based coders, on the other hand, utilize the morphological dilation operation to delineate the clusters of significant coefficients for improving coding performance. In this paper, a novel dilation-run image coding algorithm is developed by taking the advantages of both schemes, in which the clustered significant coefficients are extracted by using the morphological dilation operation and the insignificant coefficients between the extracted clusters are coded by using the run-length coding method. The proposed dilation-run image coder is implemented in the framework of bitplane coding for producing embedded bitstreams. Compared with several state-of-the-art wavelet image coding methods, the proposed dilation-run image coding method achieves comparable rate-distortion coding performance, especially more attractive for fingerprint type of imageries.

A spatial framework for multi-scale computational neuroanatomy

Event Abstract Back to Event A spatial framework for multi-scale computational neuroanatomy Stephen Larson1* and Maryann Martone1 1 University of California, United States Cellular networks in the brain are fundamentally multi-scale, with relevant data contained in subcellular junctional connectivity, cytoarchitectural local connectivity, and long-range topographical connectivity. Experimental limitations make it difficult to study all these scales simultaneously, and consequently experimental methodologies tend to only reveal organization on a single scale. In order to generate hypotheses across scales, however, we must begin by analyzing the structure of brain tissue across scales. Modern advances in microscopic technology are now able to reveal organization across several scales, yet tools to analyze these data are lagging behind. In order to rigorously analyze this multi-scale three-dimensional organization of these networks, we have developed a computational framework that creates spatial and semantic representations of brain tissue. Previous work has led to the development of a multi-scale formal ontology of neuroanatomy (BIRNLex). The ontology synthesizes observations that have been gathered from published works, databases, and primary-source light and EM microscopic data. The ontology builds upon our work in constructing an ontology for subcellular anatomy (SAO: http://ccdb.ucsd.edu/SAO), encompassing cells, parts of cells and supracellular structures like synapses. The SAO and BIRNLex have been built using the Web Ontology Language (OWL), a language that supports reasoning over classes and instances of classes. The SAO allows us to describe the subcellular localization of molecular entities and also allows us to relate any part of a cell to higher order brain structure. Thus, any part of a neuron may be localized in a higher order brain region, recognizing the fact that neurons are large cells whose processes span many brain regions. These higher order brain regions are derived from other ontologies and terminological resources, e.g., the Brain Architecture Management System (BAMS). Here we show how formal ontologies of brain structure across scales can be combined with spatial models of cell morphologies. We also demonstrate how an open standard for neuronal shape (MorphML) can be combined with OWL ontologies to annotate its structure with semantic knowledge. These combined spatial and semantic representations of cell morphologies lay the groundwork for combined spatial and semantic reasoning, as well as exporting annotated morphologies as networks to simulation environments. Conference: Neuroinformatics 2008, Stockholm, Sweden, 7 Sep - 9 Sep, 2008. Presentation Type: Oral Presentation Topic: Live Demonstrations Citation: Larson S and Martone M (2008). A spatial framework for multi-scale computational neuroanatomy. Front. Neuroinform. Conference Abstract: Neuroinformatics 2008. doi: 10.3389/conf.neuro.11.2008.01.134 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 28 Jul 2008; Published Online: 28 Jul 2008. * Correspondence: Stephen Larson, University of California, San Diego, United States, nemoABS01@frontiersin.org Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Stephen Larson Maryann Martone Google Stephen Larson Maryann Martone Google Scholar Stephen Larson Maryann Martone PubMed Stephen Larson Maryann Martone Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.

Writing System and Visual Word Recognition:Morphological Representation and Processing in Korean

Writing System and Visual Word Recognition:Morphological Representation and Processing in Korean

Efficient embedded wavelet codec based on list structure

A new efficient image codec called embedded wavelet coding based on list structure (EWCBL) is proposed in this paper. By combining the techniques of morphological representation and quadtree partitioning, EWCBL effectively exploits both within-subband clustering and cross-subband similarity of wavelet coefficients. Based on the list structure, a fine fractional bit-plane coding is employed to achieve excellent rate-distortion performance. The patterned morphological dilation is introduced to greatly reduce the redundant test operations. Experimental results show that the proposed EWCBL outperforms state-of-the-art embedded codecs for both lossy and lossless compression. Moreover, the good performance and features of embeddedness and scalability are achieved with relatively low complexity.

Updating channel morphology in digital elevation models: lahar assessment for Tenenepanco-Huiloac Gorge, Popocatépetl volcano, Mexico

In contrast to dramatic flow regime changes by less frequent large-scale volcanic eruptions, those caused by more frequent small-scale processes in volcanic landscapes may also drastically change the direction and dynamics of flow in a drainage system formed solely by fluvial processes. During such periods of channel morphology change, it is necessary to frequently update channel flow parameters to assess preventive measures for civil protection purposes. Often aerial photography is impracticable, since parts of the channels are covered by dense vegetation, while total station and laser topographic surveys are often too slow and costly, particularly during a high frequency of events. This article introduces and validates a new methodology for updating the representation of channel morphology in Digital Elevation Models (DEM) used specifically for assessing the dangers of frequently occurring lahars along gorges in volcanic landscapes during eruptive and non-eruptive periods. The updating of channel cross-sections was achieved by inserting more detailed representative profiles of homogeneous channel sectors in DEMs derived from existing less detailed topographic maps. The channel profiles were surveyed along the thalweg in equidistant points according to Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) (x,y) coordinates and elevation derived from the existing DEM. The proposed technique was applied at Tenenepanco-Huiloac Gorge on Popocatepetl volcano, Mexico, in an area affected by major lahars during the volcano’s most recent eruptive period from 1994 to 2005. The proposed method can reduce the cost and person-hours of a regular channel topographic survey dramatically and the enhanced DEM can determine volume parameters and flood zones associated with the 1 July 1997 and 21 January 2001 lahars, respectively. In addition, the updated DEM with better channel representation allowed a more realistic fluid flow and lahar simulation with the process-based TITAN2D model.

Morphological priming effects on children’s spelling

Previous research has suggested that children in the early grades of primary school do not have much awareness of morphemes. In this study, a priming paradigm was used to try to detect early signs of morphological representation of stems through a spelling task presented to Portuguese children (N = 805; age range 6–9 years). Primes shared the stem with the targets and contained well-articulated, stressed vowels; the stems of the target words and pseudo-words contained non-stressed schwa vowels, which typically result in spelling difficulties. If priming proved effective, the well-articulated vowels in the prime should result in an improvement in the spelling of the schwa vowels. Primes were presented in two conditions: in only-oral or in oral-plus-written form. Effectiveness of priming was assessed by comparison with a no-priming condition. For both words and pseudowords, there was a significant interaction between priming effects and grade. No priming effects were detected in 6- and 7-year-old children; oral-plus-written priming produced higher rates of correct vowel spelling for 8- and 9-year-olds; only-oral priming was effective in improving the vowel spelling of 9-year-olds. Thus older children can use morphological information under priming conditions when the prime and the target are not phonologically transparent but there is no evidence to suggest that younger children do so.

Prosodic structure and the representation of L2 functional morphology: A nativist approach

In this paper, we argue against the emergentist position that functional morphology can be acquired by induction from properties of the target-language surface phonetic string. Two experiments are presented, which examine oral production data from Mandarin speakers at intermediate levels of proficiency in English. The first experiment is on the acquisition of English past tense morphology, the second on the acquisition of English articles. In both cases, learners are quite successful at supplying the appropriate morphology. A detailed examination of the phonetics of learners’ outputs shows that many of their productions cannot be derived from the surface strings available in the ambient input. In particular, the L2 learners produce tense and articles in ways which are not found in either the L1 or the L2, namely, with fortis release on tense inflection and stress on articles. We maintain that options made available by Universal Grammar, together with transfer of prosodic representations from the L1, best account for such behaviour.

Anatomical Equivalence Class: A Morphological Analysis Framework Using a Lossless Shape Descriptor

Methods of computational anatomy are typically based on a spatial transformation that maps a template to an individual anatomy and vice versa. However, important morphological characteristics are frequently not captured by this transformation, thereby leading to lossy representations. We extend this formulation by incorporating residual anatomical information, i.e., information that is not captured by the shape transformation but is necessary in order to fully and exactly reconstruct the anatomy under measurement. We, therefore, arrive at a lossless morphological representation. By virtue of being lossless, this representation allows us to represent the same anatomy by an infinite number of pairs [transformation, residual], since different residuals correspond to different transformations. We treat these pairs as members of an anatomical equivalence class (AEC), which we approximate using principal component analysis. We show that projection onto the orthogonal to the AEC subspace produces measurements that allow us to better detect morphological abnormalities by eliminating variation in the data that is irrelevant and confounds underlying subtle morphological characteristics. Finally, we show that higher classification rates between a group of normal brains and a group of brains with localized atrophy are obtained if we use nonmetric distances between AECs instead of conventional Euclidean distances between individual morphological measurements. The results confirm that this representation can improve the results compared to conventional analysis, but also highlight limitations of the current approach and point to directions of further development of this general morphological analysis framework.

Morphological Decomposition of 2-D Binary Shapes Into Modestly Overlapped Octagonal and Disk Components

One problem with several leading morphological shape representation algorithms is the heavy overlapping among the representative disks of the same size. A shape component formed by grouping connected disk centers may use many heavily overlapping disks to represent a simple shape part. Sometimes, these representative disks form complicated structures. A generalized skeleton transform was recently introduced which allows a shape to be represented as a collection of modestly overlapped octagonal shape parts. However, the generalized skeleton transform needs to be applied many times. Furthermore, an octagonal component is not easily matched up with another octagonal component. In this paper, we describe a octagon-fitting algorithm which identifies a special maximal octagon for each image point in a given shape. This transform leads to the development of two new shape decomposition algorithms. These algorithms are more efficient to implement; the octagon-fitting algorithm only needs to be applied once. The components generated are better characterized mathematically. The disk components used in the second decomposition algorithm are more primitive than octagons and easily matched up with other disk components from another shape. The experiments show that the new decomposition algorithms produce as efficient representations as the old algorithm for both exact and approximate cases. A simple shape-matching algorithm using disk components is also demonstrated.

COMPARE: Classification of Morphological Patterns Using Adaptive Regional Elements

This paper presents a method for classification of structural brain magnetic resonance (MR) images, by using a combination of deformation-based morphometry and machine learning methods. A morphological representation of the anatomy of interest is first obtained using a high-dimensional mass-preserving template warping method, which results in tissue density maps that constitute local tissue volumetric measurements. Regions that display strong correlations between tissue volume and classification (clinical) variables are extracted using a watershed segmentation algorithm, taking into account the regional smoothness of the correlation map which is estimated by a cross-validation strategy to achieve robustness to outliers. A volume increment algorithm is then applied to these regions to extract regional volumetric features, from which a feature selection technique using support vector machine (SVM)-based criteria is used to select the most discriminative features, according to their effect on the upper bound of the leave-one-out generalization error. Finally, SVM-based classification is applied using the best set of features, and it is tested using a leave-one-out cross-validation strategy. The results on MR brain images of healthy controls and schizophrenia patients demonstrate not only high classification accuracy (91.8% for female subjects and 90.8% for male subjects), but also good stability with respect to the number of features selected and the size of SVM kernel used.

Cognitive Linguistics (review)

Reviewed by: Cognitive linguistics by William Croft and D. Alan Cruse Laura A. Michaelis Cognitive linguistics. By William Croft and D. Alan Cruse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xv, 356. ISBN 0521667704. $33. Cognitive linguistics is the joint product of largely independent research programs begun in the late 1970s and early 1980s by scholars who shared the general goal of making grammatical and semantic theory responsible to the facts of usage and the flexibility of the human conceptual capacity. But what kind of product is it? To those outside the immediate spheres of influence of its major proponents (George Lakoff, Ronald Langacker, Gilles Fauconnier, Leonard Talmy, among others), it might appear to be nothing more than an inventory of disparate constructs (prototype-based categories, semantic frames, mental spaces, metaphorical mappings) or even a [End Page 898] set of case studies of linguistic idiosyncrasies. It doesn’t seem to DO anything, or at least it does not provide a uniform grammatical or semantic formalism. Instead, cognitive linguistics is a worldview, in which words, rather than denoting things in the world, are points of entry into conceptual networks (Langacker 1987, 1991), and syntactic patterns, rather than merely grouping symbols together, are cognitive and even motor routines of varying degrees of entrenchment and internal complexity (Bybee 2001). Since in this view both words and grammatical patterns have meanings, grammatical patterns may shift the designations of lexical items with which they combine, resulting, for example, in the augmentation of a verb’s array of arguments (Goldberg 1995, 2007). For example, in the attested sentence A gruff police monk barked them back to work, the nonce combination of a monovalent verb of sound production (bark) with the trivalent caused-motion construction forces a construal in which barking effects movement of the theme from one (metaphorical) location to another. This context-sensitive approach to linguistic meaning has been susceptible to the criticism that it is anti-rigor, particularly in its abandonment of constituent-structure-based semantic composition, because until now there has been no comprehensive and accessible introduction to the body of evidence on which it is based. This situation has changed with the publication of Croft and Cruse’s excellent book, Cognitive linguistics, part of the ‘Cambridge textbooks in linguistics’ series. The central theme of this work, which is as likely to appeal to scholars of literature as it is to cognitive psychologists, is that ‘words do not have meanings, nor do sentences have meanings: meanings are something that we construe, using the properties of linguistic elements as partial clues, alongside nonlinguistic knowledge, information available from context, knowledge and conjectures regarding the state of mind of hearers and so on’ (98). Written in a lively way and transparently organized, this book will not only engage students of linguistics and language scholars outside of linguistics but also serve as a reference for working linguists. An outstanding achievement of this work is that it seamlessly integrates four streams of scholarship that, while traditionally subsumed under the rubric of cognitive linguistics, have not generally been combined: (i) models of word meaning based on image schemas, frame semantics, and metaphor; (ii) approaches to referential opacity, presupposition, and counterfactuality based on the mental-spaces framework; (iii) construction-based approaches to grammar; and (iv) usage-based approaches to the representation of grammar and morphology. One such combination is found in the treatment of metaphor in Ch. 8. Here, C&C describe a weakness of the influential Lakoff and Johnson (1980) theory of metaphor—that it does not capture the fact that the interpretation of many metaphorical expressions requires alterations to the metaphor’s source domain ontology. For example, in the sentence That surgeon is a butcher, we do not construe the surgeon as performing butchery on a human carcass intended for consumption, but rather as performing surgery on a living patient in a haphazard way. To account for such cases, C&C propose an enriched model of metaphorical mapping based on models of mental-space blending proposed by Fauconnier and Turner (2002) and Grady and colleagues (1999). An additional achievement of the work is that it succeeds in highlighting connections between cognitive linguistics and models of categorization, sentence processing, and...

The Plant Structure Ontology, a Unified Vocabulary of Anatomy and Morphology of a Flowering Plant

Formal description of plant phenotypes and standardized annotation of gene expression and protein localization data require uniform terminology that accurately describes plant anatomy and morphology. This facilitates cross species comparative studies and quantitative comparison of phenotypes and expression patterns. A major drawback is variable terminology that is used to describe plant anatomy and morphology in publications and genomic databases for different species. The same terms are sometimes applied to different plant structures in different taxonomic groups. Conversely, similar structures are named by their species-specific terms. To address this problem, we created the Plant Structure Ontology (PSO), the first generic ontological representation of anatomy and morphology of a flowering plant. The PSO is intended for a broad plant research community, including bench scientists, curators in genomic databases, and bioinformaticians. The initial releases of the PSO integrated existing ontologies for Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana), maize (Zea mays), and rice (Oryza sativa); more recent versions of the ontology encompass terms relevant to Fabaceae, Solanaceae, additional cereal crops, and poplar (Populus spp.). Databases such as The Arabidopsis Information Resource, Nottingham Arabidopsis Stock Centre, Gramene, MaizeGDB, and SOL Genomics Network are using the PSO to describe expression patterns of genes and phenotypes of mutants and natural variants and are regularly contributing new annotations to the Plant Ontology database. The PSO is also used in specialized public databases, such as BRENDA, GENEVESTIGATOR, NASCArrays, and others. Over 10,000 gene annotations and phenotype descriptions from participating databases can be queried and retrieved using the Plant Ontology browser. The PSO, as well as contributed gene associations, can be obtained at www.plantontology.org.

Spatially Variant Morphological Restoration and Skeleton Representation

The theory of spatially variant (SV) mathematical morphology is used to extend and analyze two important image processing applications: morphological image restoration and skeleton representation of binary images. For morphological image restoration, we propose the SV alternating sequential filters and SV median filters. We establish the relation of SV median filters to the basic SV morphological operators (i.e., SV erosions and SV dilations). For skeleton representation, we present a general framework for the SV morphological skeleton representation of binary images. We study the properties of the SV morphological skeleton representation and derive conditions for its invertibility. We also develop an algorithm for the implementation of the SV morphological skeleton representation of binary images. The latter algorithm is based on the optimal construction of the SV structuring element mapping designed to minimize the cardinality of the SV morphological skeleton representation. Experimental results show the dramatic improvement in the performance of the SV morphological restoration and SV morphological skeleton representation algorithms in comparison to their translation-invariant counterparts.

Passive verb morphology: The effect of phonotactics on passive comprehension in typically developing and Grammatical-SLI children

In this study we explore the impact of a morphological deficit on syntactic comprehension. A self-paced listening task was designed to investigate passive sentence processing in typically developing (TD) children and children with Grammatical-Specific Language Impairment (G-SLI). Participants had to judge whether the sentence they heard matched a picture they were shown. Working within the framework of the Computational Grammatical Complexity Hypothesis, which stresses how different components of the grammar interact, we tested whether children were able to use phonotactic cues to parse reversible passive sentences of the form the X was verbed by Y. We predicted that TD children would be able to use phonotactics to parse a form like touched or hugged as a participle, and hence interpret passive sentences correctly. This cue is predicted not be used by G-SLI children, because they have difficulty building complex morphological representations. We demonstrate that indeed TD, but not G-SLI, children are able to use phonotactics cues in parsing passive sentences.

Domain morphology fromk-space spectroscopy of ferroelectric crystals

A nonlinear-optical investigation technique for the domain structuring in ferroelectric crystals is reported. Noncollinear optical frequency doubling in a quasiphase-matched scheme allows for conclusions on the $k$-space representation of the domain morphology or---putting it in other terms---on the $k$-space representation of the correlation lengths (k-space spectroscopy). As an example, the ferroelectric-to-paraelectric phase transition of the relaxor ferroelectric strontium-barium niobate (SBN) is studied. One important result is that homogeneously poled crystals of SBN do not uniquely go through the phase transition as commonly assumed. Instead, the correlation length shows a characteristic anisotropic behavior in the phase-transition region.

Verb morphology in second language versus third language acquisition

This paper reports an experimental study on L2 vs. L3 Spanish morphological representation. A total of 19 Spanish learners (10 Chinese native speakers who are upper intermediate to advanced L2 English users as well as 9 English native speakers who do not speak a prior language without overt morphology) participated in the study. A written production task using Spanish nonce verbs was used to elicit regular and irregular forms of Spanish past participles. The study revealed differences between native and non-native Spanish speakers but ones that are still compatible with an approach which posits a dual mechanism for morphological processing. In addition, no principal difference between the L2 and the L3 Spanish learners was identified. A follow-up experiment on L2 English was therefore carried out testing 26 native speakers of Chinese and 17 native speakers of English using a written production task eliciting English regular and irregular past tense forms for both real verbs and nonce verbs. The findings suggested that native and non-native English speakers’ performances pattern similarly. It seems that L2 English plays a crucial role in Chinese speakers’ L3 Spanish morphological representation and in their similar performance to the L1 English-L2 Spanish speakers.