Chapter published in:
Bilingualism: A framework for understanding the mental lexicon
Edited by Maya Libben, Mira Goral and Gary Libben
[Bilingual Processing and Acquisition 6] 2017
► pp. 197–216

Morphological integration and the bilingual lexicon

In English, as in most of the world’s languages, the majority of words are multimorphemic. In the psycholinguistic literature on lexical processing in bilinguals, however, multimorphemic words have thus far received relatively little treatment. In this chapter, we discuss the opportunities that the study of multimorphemic words afford. We also consider the consequences that a multimorphemic perspective may have on the conceptualization of the bilingual mental lexicon in general and on the links among lexical reoperations within in. We present a study of compound processing among Hebrew-English bilinguals. These bilinguals performed a lexical decision task with constituent priming in both their languages. We investigated within and between language priming effects as well as differences among compound word types. Results point to a highly integrated lexical organization but also illustrate the complexity of such experimental studies.

Article outline
  • 1.The hypothesis of morphological integration
  • 2.Compound words as an ideal testing domain
  • 3.Compound structure in Hebrew and English
  • 4.A window to morphological integration
  • 5.Method
    • 5.1Participants
    • 5.2The multi-stage paradigm
    • 5.3Block A: Hebrew on its own
    • 5.4Block B: Hebrew targets and Hebrew and English primes
    • 5.5Block C: English on its own
    • 5.6Block D: English targets and Hebrew and English primes
    • 5.7Task procedure
  • 6.Results and conclusions
    • 6.1Prediction 1: Within language priming
    • 6.2Prediction 2: Cross language priming
    • 6.3Prediction 3: Cross-language morphological correspondence
  • 7.General discussion
  • Author note
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 20 December 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/bpa.6.09lib
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