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SECOND LANGUAGE USERS EXHIBIT SHALLOW MORPHOLOGICAL PROCESSING

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2020

Yoonsang Song Open the ORCID record for Yoonsang Song [Opens in a new window] ,
Youngah Do Open the ORCID record for Youngah Do [Opens in a new window] ,
Arthur L. Thompson ,
Eileen R. Waegemaekers  and
Jongbong Lee Open the ORCID record for Jongbong Lee [Opens in a new window]
Yoonsang Song*
Affiliation:
University of Hong Kong
Youngah Do*
Affiliation:
University of Hong Kong
Arthur L. Thompson
Affiliation:
University of Hong Kong
Eileen R. Waegemaekers
Affiliation:
University of Hong Kong
Jongbong Lee
Affiliation:
Nagoya University of Commerce & Business
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Yoonsang Song or Youngah Do, Department of Linguistics, University of Hong Kong, Rm 930, 9/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong. E-mail: yoonsang@hku.hk (Y.S.) or youngah@hku.hk (Y.D.)
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Yoonsang Song or Youngah Do, Department of Linguistics, University of Hong Kong, Rm 930, 9/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong. E-mail: yoonsang@hku.hk (Y.S.) or youngah@hku.hk (Y.D.)
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Abstract

The present study tests the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH), which claims that compared to L1 processing, L2 language processing generally underuses grammatical information, prioritizing nongrammatical information. Specifically, this cross-modal priming study tests SSH at the level of morphology, investigating whether late advanced L2 learners construct hierarchically structured representations for trimorphemic derived words during real-time processing as native speakers do. Our results support SSH. In lexical decision on English trimorphemic words (e.g., unkindness or [[un-[kind]]-ness]), L1 recognition of the targets was facilitated by their bimorphemic morphological-structural constituent primes (e.g., unkind), but not by their bimorphemic nonconstituent primes (e.g., kindness), which were only semantically and formally related to the target. In contrast, L2 recognition was equally facilitated by both constituent and nonconstituent primes. These results suggest that unlike L1 processing, L2 processing of multimorphemic words is not mainly guided by detailed morphological structure, overrelying on nonstructural information.

Type
Research Report
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 42 , Issue 5 , December 2020 , pp. 1121 - 1136
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Open Practices
Open data
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

The experiment in this article earned an Open Data badge for transparent practices. The materials are available at https://osf.io/sa37y/

References

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