Masked constituent priming of English compounds in native and non-native speakers

Abstract

The present research explores the degree of morphological structure of compound words in the native and nonnative lexicons, and provides additional data on the access to these representations. Native and nonnative speakers (L1 Spanish) of English were tested using a lexical decision task with masked priming of the compound's constituents in isolation, including two orthographic conditions to control for a potential orthographic locus of effects. Both groups displayed reliable priming effects, unmediated by semantics, for the morphological but not the orthographic conditions as compared to an unrelated baseline. Results contribute further evidence of morphological structure in the lexicon of native speakers, and suggest that lexical representation and access in a second language are qualitatively comparable at relatively advanced levels of proficiency.Keywords: lexical representation; non-native speakers; compounds; morphological processing; masked priming. IntroductionAmong the considerable issues in visual word recognition research, the role of morphology is hotly debated. While many agree that, at least in some cases, native visual word processing involves morphological decomposition for complex words (e.g., Marslen-Wilson, 2007), there is no consensus as to exactly how, when, and under what conditions this happens. As with any other aspect of language processing, access is crucially interesting for psycholinguists in that it is inextricably bound to representation.In fact, the existence of-or even the need for-a morphologically structured lexicon has been the subject of much discussion (see, e.g., Feldman, O'Connor, & Moscoso del Prado Martín, 2009). Focused on the visual processing of English compound words in isolation, the data reported in this article provide supporting evidence for models assuming some degree of morphological structure in the lexicon of native speakers, and suggests that lexical representations in relatively proficient second language users are equally complex.The role constituent morphemes play in the access to, and representation of, complex words has been explored systematically for the last 40 years, from the seminal studies of Forster, 1975, 1976) to the proliferation of research contrasting behavioural, electrophysiological, neuroimaging and clinical data (e.g., Bozic, Marslen-Wilson, Stamatakis, Davis, & Tyler, 2007;Fiorentino, Naito-billen, Bost, & Fund-Reznicek, 2014;MacGregor & Shtyrov, 2013;Marelli, Zonca, Contardi, & Luzzatti, 2014; Marslen-Wilson & Tyler, 2007, among others). Current positions range from models advocating exclusively morpheme mediated access (Stockall & Marantz, 2006;Taft & Nillsen, 2013), to dual/multiple-route accounts highlighting the competition (and/or cooperation) between whole-form and morpheme-based access (Hyönä, 2012), to proposals questioning the role of morphology in favour of a distributed-connectionist implementation of unmediated access to constituent and whole-word meanings through orthographic and/or phonological cues (e.g., Devlin, Jami...

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

“…Masked priming studies, for example, revealed efficient priming effects for both the head and the modifier components of compounds, and for both transparent and opaque compounds Duñabeitia, Laka, Perea, & Carreiras, 2009;Fiorentino & Fund-Reznicek, 2009). Furthermore, studies comparing L1 and proficient L2 speakers found similar effects of decomposition of compounds for both speaker groups (González Alonso, Baquero Castellanos, & Müller, 2016;Uygun & Gürel, 2017). Priming studies of inflection, on the other hand, have led to more variable outcomes.…”

Garden plants and butter knives

“…This perspective on the development of linguistic proficiency among the non-native speakers is consistent with our view in this paper as well. The study on synthetic compounds by González Alonso et al (2016) also provides robust evidence of morphological priming among both native and non-native participants. While their native and non-native speakers differed in terms of RT and accuracy, they patterned similarly to different types of priming and showed almost identical use of morphological structure.…”

“…The issue of processing by native and non-native speakers has attracted a lot of attention in recent years (inter alia, Conklin & Schmitt 2008;Feldman et al 2010;Clahsen & Neubauer 2010;Diependaele et al 2011;Siyanova-Chanturia et al 2011;De Cat et al 2014;González Alonso et al 2016), but the results do not seem to be unidirectional. 10 Siyanova-Chanturia et al (2011) found that native and non-native speakers differ in terms of speed of processing idioms and novel phrases.…”

Compound processing in second language acquisition of English

“…The intermediate group was the slowest as in González Alonso et al (2016aAlonso et al ( , 2016b and Li et al (2017). Native speakers recognized compounds significantly faster than noncompounds, and both constituents were activated in compound processing.…”

“…This was taken as evidence for decomposition in L2 learners. In another study, González Alonso et al (2016b) compared the processing of English noun-verb-er compounds (e.g. cheerleader) by native and (L1 Spanish) non-native speakers of English via a masked priming task including five conditions: first constituent (e.g., fund-FUNDRAISER), second constituent (e.g.…”