Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T22:36:03.834Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

How word frequency affects morphological processing in monolinguals and bilinguals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2004

MINNA LEHTONEN
Affiliation:
Åbo Akademi University
MATTI LAINE
Affiliation:
Åbo Akademi University

Abstract

The present study investigated processing of morphologically complex words in three different frequency ranges in monolingual Finnish speakers and Finnish-Swedish bilinguals. By employing a visual lexical decision task, we found a differential pattern of results in monolinguals vs. bilinguals. Monolingual Finns seemed to process low frequency and medium frequency inflected Finnish nouns mostly by morpheme-based recognition but high frequency inflected nouns through full-form representations. In contrast, bilinguals demonstrated a processing delay for all inflections throughout the whole frequency range, suggesting decomposition for all inflected targets. This may reflect different amounts of exposure to the word forms in the two groups. Inflected word forms that are encountered very frequently will acquire full-form representations, which saves processing time. However, with the lower rates of exposure, which characterize bilingual individuals, full-form representations do not start to develop.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Cambridge University Press 2003

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

This study was financially supported by a grant (#20010) from the Joint Committee of the Nordic Social Science Research Councils (NOS-S) to the second author.