Article published in:
The Mental Lexicon
Vol. 11:1 (2016) ► pp. 26–54

Accessing Morphosyntax in L1 and L2 Word Recognition

A Priming Study of Inflected German Adjectives

| Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism
| Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism
In fusional languages, inflectional affixes may encode multiple morphosyntactic features such as case, number, and gender. To determine how these features are accessed during both native (L1) and non-native (L2) word recognition, the present study compares the results from a masked visual priming experiment testing inflected adjectives of German to those of a previous overt (cross-modal) priming experiment on the same phenomenon. While for the L1 group both experiments produced converging results, a group of highly-proficient Russian L2 learners of German showed native-like modulations of repetition priming effects under overt, but not under masked priming conditions. These results indicate that not only affixes but also their morphosyntactic features are accessible during initial form-based lexical access, albeit only for L1 and not for L2 processing. We argue that this contrast is in line with other findings suggesting that non-native language processing is less influenced by structural information than the L1.
Keywords: masked priming, inflection, late bilinguals, morphosyntax
Published online: 16 June 2016
https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.11.1.02bos
References
Anderson, S
(1992) A-morphous morphology. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Aronoff, M
(1994) Morphology by itself. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Baayen, H., Piepenbrock, R., & van Rijn, H
(1993) The CELEX lexical database (CD-ROM). Philadelphia, PA: Linguistic Data Consortium.Google Scholar
Basnight-Brown, D.M., Chen, L., Hua, S., Kostić, A., & Feldman, L.B.
(2007) Monolingual and bilingual recognition of regular and irregular English verbs: Sensitivity to form similarity varies with first language experience. Journal of Memory and Language, 571, 65–80. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Blevins, J.P.
(2000) Markedness and blocking in German declensional paradigms. In B. Stiebels & D. Wunderlich (Eds.), Lexicon in focus (pp. 83–103). Berlin: Akademie Verlag.Google Scholar
Bosch, S., Krause, H., & Leminen, A
(2016) The time-course of morphosyntactic and semantic priming in late bilinguals: A study of German adjectives. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Boudelaa, S., & Marslen-Wilson, W.D
(2005) Discontinuous morphology in time: Incremental masked Arabic priming. Language and Cognitive Processes, 201, 207–260. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Carstairs, A
(1987) Allomorphy in inflexion. London: Croom Helm.Google Scholar
Chen, L., Shu, H., Liu, Y., Zhao, J., & Li, P
(2007) ERP signatures of subject-verb agreement in L2 learning. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 101, 161–174. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Clahsen, H., Balkhair, L., Schutter, J.-S., & Cunnings, I
(2013) The time course of morphological processing in a second language. Second Language Research, 291, 7–31. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Clahsen, H., Eisenbeiss, S., Hadler, M., & Sonnenstuhl, I
(2001) The mental representation of inflected words: An experimental study of adjectives and verbs in German. Language, 771, 510–543. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Clahsen, H., & Neubauer, K
(2010) Morphology, frequency, and the processing of derived words in native and non-native speakers. Lingua 1201, 2627–2637. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Coughlin, C.E., & Tremblay, A
(2015) Morphological decomposition in native and non-native French speakers. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 181, 524–542. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Crepaldi, D., Rastle, K., Colheart, M., & Nickels, L
(2010) ‘Fell’ primes ‘fall’, but does ‘bell’ prime ‘ball’? Masked priming with irregularly-inflected primes. Journal of Memory and Language, 631, 83–99. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
DeKeyser, R
(2005) What makes learning a second-language grammar difficult? A review of issues. Language Learning, 551, 1–25. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Dimroth, C
(2008) Age effects on the process of L2 acquisition? Evidence from the acquisition of negation and finiteness in L2 German. Language Learning, 581, 117–150. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Feldman, L.B., Kostic, A., Basnight-Brown, D.M., Filipovic Djurdjevic, D., & Pastizzo, M.J.
(2010) Morphological facilitation for regular and irregular verb formations in native and non-native speakers: Little evidence for two distinct mechanisms. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 131, 119–135. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Forster, K.I., & Azuma, T
(2000) Masked priming for prefixed words with bound stems: Does submit prime permit? Language and Cognitive Processes, 151, 539–561. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Forster, K.I., & Davis, C
(1984) Repetition priming and frequency attenuation in lexical access. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 101, 680–698. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Forster, K.I., & Forster, J.C.
(2003) DMDX: A windows display program with millisecond accuracy. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers, 351, 116–124. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Gonnerman, L., Seidenberg, M., & Andersen, E
(2007) Graded semantic and phonological similarity effects in priming: Evidence for a distributed connectionist approach to morphology. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 1361, 323–345. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Heyer, V., & Clahsen, H
(2015) Late bilinguals see a scan in scanner AND in scandal: Dissecting formal overlap from morphological priming in the processing of derived words. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 181, 543–550. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Jackson, C.N.
(2008) Proficiency level and the interaction of lexical and morphosyntactic information during L2 sentence processing. Language Learning, 581, 875–909. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Jackson, C.N., & Bobb, S.C.
(2009) The processing and comprehension of wh-questions among second language speakers of German. Applied Psycholinguistics, 301, 603–636. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Jackson, C.N., & Dussias, P.E.
(2009) Cross-linguistic differences and their impact on L2 sentence processing. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 121, 65–82. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Jacob, G., Fleischhauer, E., & Clahsen, H
(2013) Stem allomorphy and affixation in morphological processing: A cross-modal priming study with late bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 161, 924–933. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Jiang, N
(2004) Morphological insensitivity in second language processing. Applied Psycholinguistics, 251, 603–634. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2007) Selective integration of linguistic knowledge in adult second language learning. Language Learning, 571, 1–33. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Keating, G
(2009) Sensitivity to violations of gender agreement in native and nonnative Spanish: An eye-movement investigation. Language Learning, 591, 503–535. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kirkici, B., & Clahsen, H
(2013) Inflection and derivation in native and non-native language processing: Masked priming experiments on Turkish. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 161, 776–794. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Leminen, A., & Clahsen, H
(2014) Brain potentials to inflected adjectives: Beyond storage and decomposition. Brain Research, 15431, 223–234. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lew-Williams, C., & Fernald, A
(2007) Young children learning Spanish make rapid use of grammatical gender in spoken word recognition. Psychological Science, 181, 193–198. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Longtin, C.-M., Segui, J., & Hallé, P.A
(2003) Morphological priming without morphological relationship. Language and Cognitive Processes, 181, 313–334. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Longtin, C.-M., & Meunier, F
(2005) Morphological decomposition in early visual word processing. Journal of Memory and Language, 531, 26–41. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Marslen-Wilson, W
(2007) Morphological processes in language comprehension. In G. Gaskel (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of psycholinguistics (pp. 175–193). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Marslen-Wilson, W.D., Bozic, M., & Randall, B
(2008) Early decomposition in visual word recognition: Dissociating morphology, form and meaning. Language and Cognitive Processes, 231, 394–421. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Meisel, J
(2011) First and second language acquisition: Parallels and differences. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Neubauer, K., & Clahsen, H
(2009) Decomposition of inflected words in a second language: An experimental study of German participles. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 311, 403–435. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Opitz, A., Regel, S., Müller, G., & Friederici, A.D.
(2013) Neurophysiological evidence for morphological underspecification in German strong adjective inflection. Language, 891, 231–264. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Parodi, T
(2000) Finiteness and verb placement in second language acquisition. Second Language Research, 161, 355–381. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Penke, M., Janssen, U., & Eisenbeiss, S
(2004) Psycholinguistic evidence for the underspecification of morphosyntactic features. Brain and Language, 901, 423–433. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Rastle, K., & Davis, M.H.
(2003) Reading morphologically-complex words: Some thoughts from masked priming. In S. Kinoshita & S.J. Lupker (Eds.), Masked priming: State of the art (pp. 279–305). Hove, UK: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Rastle, K., Davis, M.H., & New, B
(2004) The broth in my brother’s brothel: Morpho-orthographic segmentation in visual word recognition. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 111, 1090–1098. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Rastle, K., Davis, M.H., Marslen-Wilson, W.D., & Tyler, L.K.
(2000) Morphological and semantic effects in visual word recognition: A time-course study. Language and Cognitive Processes, 151, 507–537. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Sato, M., & Felser, C
(2010) Sensitivity to morphosyntactic violations in English as a second language. Second Language, 91, 101–118.Google Scholar
Schriefers, H., Friederici, A.D., & Graetz, P
(1992) Inflectional and derivational morphology in the mental lexicon: Symmetries and asymmetries in repetition priming. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 441, 373–390. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Silva, R., & Clahsen, H
(2008) Morphologically complex words in L1 and L2 processing: Evidence from masked priming experiments in English. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 111, 245–260. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Stump, G
(2001) Inflectional morphology: A theory of paradigm structure. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Tanner, D., Osterhout, L., & Herschensohn, J
(2009) Snapshots of grammaticalization: Differential electrophysiological responses to grammatical anomalies with increasing L2 exposure. In J. Chandlee, M. Franchini, S. Lord, & G.-M. Rheiner (Eds.), Proceedings of the 33rd Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 528–539). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla.Google Scholar
Voga, M., Anastassiadis-Symeonidis, A., & Giraudo, H
(2014) Does morphology play a role in L2 processing? Two masked priming experiments with Greek speakers of ESL. Linguisticae Investigationes, 371, 338–352. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Wunderlich, D
(1997) Der unterspezifizierte Artikel. In C. Dürscheid, K.-H. Ramers, & M. Schwarz (Eds.), Sprache im Fokus (pp. 47–55). Tübingen: Niemeyer.Google Scholar
Zwicky, A.M.
(1985) How to describe inflection. Berkeley Linguistics Society, 111, 372–386.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 4 other publications

BOSCH, SINA & ALINA LEMINEN
2018. ERP priming studies of bilingual language processing. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 21:3 ► pp. 462 ff. Crossref logo
Giraudo, Hélène & Serena Dal Maso
2018.  In The Construction of Words [Studies in Morphology, 4], ► pp. 603 ff. Crossref logo
Kimppa, Lilli, Yury Shtyrov, Suzanne C.A. Hut, Laura Hedlund, Miika Leminen & Alina Leminen
2019. Acquisition of L2 morphology by adult language learners. Cortex 116 ► pp. 74 ff. Crossref logo
Reifegerste, Jana & Harald Clahsen
2017. Accessing morphosyntactic information is preserved at old age, except for irregulars. The Mental Lexicon 12:3 ► pp. 342 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 10 april 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.