Morphological processing in bilingual speakers of German and English
It has been demonstrated that in early visual word processing, monolingual speakers process morphologically complex words in terms of their constituent morphemes (e.g., hunt+er), irrespective of the semantic relationship between stem and suffix (e.g., corn+er) (e.g., Longtin, Segui, & Halle, 2003; Rastle, Davis, & New, 2004). However, research into bilingual morphological processing has produced support for and against the notion that bilinguals process morphologically complex words akin to monolingual speakers (Clahsen, Felser, Neubauer, Sato, & Silva, 2010; Diependaele, Dufiabeitia, Morris, & Keuleers, 2011). The experiments in this work explored the nature of bilingual morphological processing in early visual word recognition, by means of masked priming. Using prime target pairs sharing a morphological a nd semantic (e.g., hunter-hunt), only a pseudo-morphological (e.g., corner-corn), and neither morphological nor semantic relationship (e.g., yellow-yell), Experiments 1 and 2 explored morphological priming in English for English L1 - German L2 and German L1 - English L2 speakers, respectively. The design was expanded to German, testing bilingual German L1 and L2 speakers in Experiments 3 and 4. Results
Otto, Elisabeth
Morphological Processing ; Bilingualism ; Priming
Morphological processing in bilingual speakers of German and English. It has been demonstrated that in early visual word processing, monolingual speakers process morphologically complex words in terms of their constituent morphemes (e.g., hunt+er), irrespective of the semantic relationship between stem and suffix (e.g., corn+er) (e.g., Longtin, Segui, & Halle, 2003; Rastle, Davis, & New, 2004). However, research into bilingual morphological processing has produced support for and against the notion that bilinguals process morphologically complex words akin to monolingual speakers (Clahsen, Felser, Neubauer, Sato, & Silva, 2010; Diependaele, Dufiabeitia, Morris, & Keuleers, 2011). The experiments in this work explored the nature of bilingual morphological processing in early visual word recognition, by means of masked priming. Using prime target pairs sharing a morphological a nd semantic (e.g., hunter-hunt), only a pseudo-morphological (e.g., corner-corn), and neither morphological nor semantic relationship (e.g., yellow-yell), Experiments 1 and 2 explored morphological priming in English for English L1 - German L2 and German L1 - English L2 speakers, respectively. The design was expanded to German, testing bilingual German L1 and L2 speakers in Experiments 3 and 4. Results
morphological process bilingual speaker german_english demonstrate early visual_word processing monolingual speaker process morphologically complex word term constituent morpheme hunt irrespective semantic relationship stem_suffix corn and new however bilingual morphological processing produce support notion bilingual process morphologically complex word akin monolingual speaker and morris and work explore_nature bilingual morphological processing early visual_word recognition mean priming using prime target pair share morphological semantic hunter hunt pseudo morphological corner corn neither morphological semantic relationship yellow explore morphological prim english english_german german english_speaker respectively design expanded german test bilingual german speaker