THE STORAGE AND PROCESSING OF MORPHOLOGICALLY COMPLEX WORDS IN L2 SPANISH. Issue 4 (11th December 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Foote, Rebecca
• Is Part Of: Studies in second language acquisition. Volume 39:Issue 4(2017)
• Page Start: 735
• Page End: 767
• Publication Date: 2015-12-11
• Subjects: Second language acquisition -- Periodicals; Language and languages -- Study and teaching -- Periodicals; 401.9
• DOI: 10.1017/S0272263115000376
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0272-2631

Abstract

Abstract : Research with native speakers indicates that, during word recognition, regularly inflected words undergo parsing that segments them into stems and affixes. In contrast, studies with learners suggest that this parsing may not take place in L2. This study's research questions are: Do L2 Spanish learners store and process regularly inflected, morphologically complex words like native speakers? Does this depend on proficiency? Does type of inflection (verbal or adjectival) play a role? Native speakers, advanced learners, and intermediate learners of Spanish completed two lexical-decision tasks. Response times were measured to target words (verbs or adjectives) preceded by masked primes that were either identical to the targets, morphologically, orthographically, or semantically related, or unrelated. All groups responded more quickly to targets when they were preceded by identical and morphologically related primes than when they were preceded by unrelated primes, with no differences due to either proficiency or inflection type.