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Morphological facilitation for regular and irregular verb formations in native and non-native speakers: Little evidence for two distinct mechanisms*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 December 2009

LAURIE BETH FELDMAN ,
ALEKSANDAR KOSTIĆ ,
DANA M. BASNIGHT-BROWN ,
DUŠICA FILIPOVIĆ ĐURĐEVIĆ  and
MATTHEW JOHN PASTIZZO
LAURIE BETH FELDMAN*
Affiliation:
University at Albany, State University of New York, Haskins Laboratories
ALEKSANDAR KOSTIĆ
Affiliation:
University of Belgrade, Haskins Laboratories, Republic of Serbia
DANA M. BASNIGHT-BROWN
Affiliation:
University at Albany, State University of New York, Haskins Laboratories
DUŠICA FILIPOVIĆ ĐURĐEVIĆ
Affiliation:
University of Belgrade, Republic of Serbia
MATTHEW JOHN PASTIZZO
Affiliation:
State University of New York at Geneseo
*
Address for correspondence: Laurie Beth Feldman, Department of Psychology (SS 369), The University at Albany, SUNY, 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany, NY 12222, USA[email protected]
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Abstract

The authors compared performance on two variants of the primed lexical decision task to investigate morphological processing in native and non-native speakers of English. They examined patterns of facilitation on present tense targets. Primes were regular (billed–bill) past tense formations and two types of irregular past tense forms that varied on preservation of target length (fell–fall; taught–teach). When a forward mask preceded the prime (Exp. 1), language and prime type interacted. Native speakers showed reliable regular and irregular length preserved facilitation relative to orthographic controls. Non-native speakers' latencies after morphological and orthographic primes did not differ reliably except for regulars. Under cross-modal conditions (Exp. 2), language and prime type interacted. Native but not non-native speakers showed inhibition following orthographically similar primes. Collectively, reliable facilitation for regulars and patterns across verb type and task provided little support for a processing dichotomy (decomposition, non-combinatorial association) based on inflectional regularity in either native or non-native speakers of English.

Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 13 , Issue 2 , April 2010 , pp. 119 - 135
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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Footnotes

*

The research reported here was supported by funds from the National Institute Of Child Health and Development Grant HD-01994 to Haskins Laboratories and by funds from the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Belgrade. We thank Harald Clahsen and Judith Kroll for comments on an earlier draft.

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