Allomorphy and affixation in morphological processing: A cross-modal priming study with late bilinguals

Abstract

This study presents results from a cross-modal priming experiment investigating inflected verb forms of German. A group of late learners of German with Russian as their native language (L1) was compared to a control group of German L1 speakers. The experiment showed different priming patterns for the two participant groups. The L1 German data yielded a stem-priming effect for inflected forms involving regular affixation and a partial priming effect for irregular forms irrespective of stem allomorphy. By contrast, the data from the late bilinguals showed reduced priming effects for both regular and irregular forms. We argue that late learners rely more on lexically stored inflected word forms during word recognition and less on morphological parsing than native speakers.

Variability and Consistency in First and Second Language Processing: A Masked Morphological Priming Study on Prefixation and Suffixation

“…Priming studies of inflection, on the other hand, have led to more variable outcomes. For L1 speakers, morphological priming effects indicative of stem–affix decomposition were found to be reduced for irregular (relative to regular) inflected words, even for irregular forms that have segmentable affixes/morphemes (Jacob, Fleischhauer, & Clahsen, ; Neubauer & Clahsen, ; Sonnenstuhl, Eisenbeiss, & Clahsen, ). For L2 speakers, a number of masked priming studies that directly compared derivation and inflection (Jacob et al., ; Kirkici & Clahsen, ; Silva & Clahsen, ) found efficient priming effects for derivation, but reduced or no priming for regular inflection in the same speakers.…”

Morphological decomposition in native and non-native French speakers

“…One view is that highly proficient late L2 learners use similar mechanisms to those used by native speakers for processing morphologically complex words (e.g., Diependaele et al, 2011;Feldman et al, 2010;Gor & Cook, 2010;Gor & Jackson, 2013;Lehtonen et al, 2006;Portin et al, 2007Portin et al, , 2008. The second view is that late L2 learners tend to rely more on whole-word storage than on decomposition for processing morphologically complex words (e.g., Babcock et al, 2012;Basnight-Brown et al, 2007;Bowden et al, 2010;Clahsen et al, 2013;Jacob et al, 2013;Neubauer & Clahsen, 2009;Silva & Clahsen, 2008). These two views are in line with two different types of accounts that have been proposed for the L2 learning and processing of grammatical information: that of McDonald (2006) vs. those of Ullman (2001Ullman ( , 2005, Paradis (1994Paradis ( , 2004Paradis ( , 2009, and DeKeyser (1997,2007).…”

“…However, they converge in suggesting that late L2 learners can rely on mechanisms similar to those used by native speakers for processing morphologically complex words, and that although morphological processing may change with increasing proficiency, these changes are quantitative rather than qualitative. The second position is that late L2 learners tend to rely more on wholeword storage than on decomposition when processing morphologically complex words (e.g., Babcock et al, 2012;Basnight-Brown et al, 2007;Bowden et al, 2010;Clahsen et al, 2013;Jacob et al, 2013;Neubauer & Clahsen, 2009;Silva & Clahsen, 2008). Some of the researchers adopting this position argue that L2 learners show a shift from whole-word storage to decomposition as they become more proficient in the target language (e.g., Babcock et al, 2012;Basnight-Brown et al, 2007;Bowden et al, 2010), thus suggesting a qualitative change in the mechanisms that underlie L2 morphological processing with increasing proficiency; others, by contrast, suggest that late L2 learners and native speakers rely on qualitatively different mechanisms for processing morphologically complex words, irrespective of proficiency (e.g., Clahsen et al, 2010Clahsen et al, , 2013Jacob et al, 2013;Neubauer & Clahsen, 2009;Silva & Clahsen, 2008).…”

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

“…Some researchers propose that, like native speakers, second language (L2) learners are indeed sensitive to the morphological structure of inflected forms, and process complex forms via their morphological constituents (e.g., Basnight-Brown et al, 2007;Feldman et al, 2010;Coughlin and Tremblay, 2015), although it has been suggested that this may only be possible at high levels of proficiency (e.g., Ullman, 2005;Bowden et al, 2010;Babcock et al, 2012). By contrast, other researchers have proposed that adult L2 learners are insensitive to inflectional morphological structure due to a deficient grammar, and this deficiency is not predicted to improve with increased proficiency (e.g., Silva and Clahsen, 2008;Neubauer and Clahsen, 2009;Clahsen et al, 2010;Jacob et al, 2013Jacob et al, , 2018. While some studies have found evidence of non-native speakers decomposing derived words (e.g., Silva and Clahsen, 2008;Jacob et al, 2018), many studies fail to find evidence for inflectional morphology decomposition.…”