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Processing cost associated with inflectional morphology in bilingual speakers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 May 2001

Marja Portin  and
Matti Laine
Marja Portin
Affiliation:
University of Turku
Matti Laine
Affiliation:
Åbo Akademi University
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Abstract

In this study the visual recognition of inflected, derived and monomorphemic Swedish nouns in monolingual Swedish and bilingual Finnish–Swedish speakers was investigated. While bilinguals were slower overall, the inflected items yielded disproportionately longer reaction times in the bilingual group. The derived items, on the other hand, elicited fastest reaction times in both groups. The observed processing cost associated with inflectional morphology indicates that bilingual language background can affect the recognition process for inflected words, possibly by leading to morpheme-based recognition which is slower than full-form recognition. Further studies are needed to examine whether this effect is specific to the language background of our bilinguals (including Finnish which is a morphologically very rich language) or whether it could be a more general processing feature in bilingual speakers faced with regular inflected forms.

Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , April 2001 , pp. 55 - 62
Copyright
© 2001 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

We are grateful to the personnel at the Research Unit for Advanced Studies in Modern Swedish (FUMS), University of Uppsala, for helping us to organise the testing of monolingual Swedish speakers. Seppo Vainio kindly helped us in technicalities. Raymond Bertram, Jukka Hyönä and Marketta Sundman commented on our study at various stages. Wido La Heij, Marcus Taft and an anonymous reviewer are thanked for their invaluable comments on this paper. Funding by Academy of Finland (grant nos. 27774 and 43301 awarded to the second author) is gratefully acknowledged.