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Morphologically complex words in L1 and L2 processing: Evidence from masked priming experiments in English*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2008

RENITA SILVA  and
HARALD CLAHSEN
RENITA SILVA
Affiliation:
University of Essex
HARALD CLAHSEN*
Affiliation:
University of Essex
*
Address for correspondence: Harald Clahsen, Department of Linguistics, University of Essex, Colchester, C04 3SQ, UK[email protected]
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Abstract

This paper reports results from masked priming experiments investigating regular past-tense forms and deadjectival nominalizations with -ness and -ity in adult native (L1) speakers of English and in different groups of advanced adult second language (L2) learners of English. While the L1 group showed efficient priming for both inflected and derived word forms, the L2 learners demonstrated repetition-priming effects (like the L1 group), but no priming for inflected and reduced priming for derived word forms. We argue that this striking contrast between L1 and L2 processing supports the view that adult L2 learners rely more on lexical storage and less on combinatorial processing of morphologically complex words than native speakers.

Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , July 2008 , pp. 245 - 260
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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Footnotes

*

We are grateful to Jim Blevins, Ian Cunnings, Sonja Eisenbeiss, Claudia Felser, Roger Hawkins, Hui-Yu Pan, Mika Sato, Michael Ullman, João Verissimo, and two anonymous BLC reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

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