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Processing of inflected nouns in late bilinguals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2007

MARJA PORTIN ,
MINNA LEHTONEN  and
MATTI LAINE
MARJA PORTIN
Affiliation:
Åbo Akademi University
MINNA LEHTONEN
Affiliation:
Åbo Akademi University
MATTI LAINE
Affiliation:
Åbo Akademi University
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Abstract

This study investigated the recognition of Swedish inflected nouns in two participant groups. Both groups were Finnish-speaking late learners of Swedish, but the groups differed in regard to their Swedish language proficiency. In a visual lexical decision task, inflected Swedish nouns from three frequency ranges were contrasted with corresponding monomorphemic nouns. The reaction times and error rates suggested morphological decomposition for low-frequency inflected words. Yet, both medium- and high-frequency inflected words appeared to possess full-form representations. Despite an overall advantage for the more proficient participants, this pattern was present in both groups. The results indicate that even late exposure to a language can yield such input representations for morphologically complex words that are typical of native speakers.

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Articles
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Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 28 , Issue 1 , January 2007 , pp. 135 - 156
Copyright
© 2007 Cambridge University Press

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