Monolingual and bilingual recognition of regular and irregular English verbs: Sensitivity to form similarity varies with first language experience

Abstract

We used a cross-modal priming procedure to explore the processing of irregular and regular English verb forms in both monolinguals and bilinguals (Serbian-English, Chinese-English). Materials included irregular nested stem (drawn-DRAW), irregular change stem (ran-RUN), and regular past tense-present tense verb pairs that were either low (guided-GUIDE) or high (pushed-PUSH) in resonance, a measure of semantic richness. Overall, semantic richness of irregular verbs (nested and irregular change) and of regular verbs (high and low resonance) was matched. Native speakers of English revealed comparable facilitation across regularity and greater facilitation for nested than change stem irregulars. Like native speakers, Serbian, but not Chinese bilinguals matched for proficiency, showed facilitation due to form overlap between irregular past and present tense forms with a nested stem. Unlike native speakers, neither group showed reliable facilitation to stem change irregulars. Results demonstrate the influence of first language on inflectional processing in a second language.Keywords semantic density; language transfer; morphological facilitation; cross modal priming; regular past tense formations; irregular past tense formations; mastery of inflection in a second language There is a long-standing debate in the word recognition literature as to whether native speakers of a language process irregular (e.g., ran-run) and regular (e.g., walked-walk) verb forms by common (single) or different (dual-route) mechanisms. Those who advocate a single processing system argue that processing of all words benefits from the extent to which words that are similar in form tend to be similar in meaning (

Parallel morpho-orthographic and morpho-semantic activation in processing second language morphologically complex words: Evidence from Chinese-English bilinguals

“…Since previous studies found that L1 characteristics may affect the processing of L2 morphologically complex words (e.g. Basnight-Brown et al, 2007), it is possible that the above findings about the morpho-semantic factor in Diependaele et al's (2011) study would be different if a new group of L2 learners with typologically different L1 and L2, such as Chinese (L1)-English (L2), are tested. Besides, only one SOA, 53 ms, was used in this study, and we do not know whether the priming effects will be different between semantically transparent primes and semantically opaque primes with shorter or longer SOAs.…”

Embodied language in first- and second-language speakers: Neural correlates of processing motor verbs

“…Lemhöfer, Koester, and Schreuder (2011)'s study on noun compounds also found evidence for more L2 reliance on decomposition. Any direct comparison between these studies is complicated by differences between the tasks (masked priming vs. unprimed lexical decision) and/or materials (inflections vs. derivations vs. compounds), and by different combinations of languages used as L1 and L2, since differences in morphological processing in the L2 may be due to differences in (the morphological richness of) the L1 of the participants (see Basnight-Brown, Chen, Hua, Kostić, & Feldman, 2007;Portin et al, 2008). Also, the contrast between transparent and opaque complex words was not specifically targeted by the studies discussed (except by Diependaele et al, 2011, in which masked priming was used).…”

An event-related potential study of cross-modal morphological and phonological priming

“…Within the morphological literature, an auditory-to-visual cross-modal priming design has been used both in the context of derivational morphology (Marslen-Wilson, Tyler, Waksler, & Older, 1994; Gonnerman, Seidenberg, & Andersen, 2007) and inflectional morphology (Allen & Badecker, 2002; Marslen-Wilson, Hare, & Older, 1993, as cited by Allen & Badecker, 2002; Marslen-Wilson & Tyler, 1998; Basnight-Brown, Chen, Hua, Kostic, & Feldman, 2007; Kielar et al, 2008, Exp. 2).…”

“…Cross-modal designs using auditory primes and visual targets have often used an ISI of 0, with the visual target appearing at prime offset (Marslen-Wilson et al, 1994; Gonnerman et al, 2007; Allen & Badecker, 2002; Basnight-Brown et al, 2007). A short ISI was considered undesirable for an ERP study, given that we wished to ensure that the ERPs to the prime words would not overlap with the ERPs to the target words, allowing us to conduct a pure analysis of the latter.…”