Hostname: page-component-7dd5485656-s6l46 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-10-31T04:34:09.001Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

THE STORAGE AND PROCESSING OF MORPHOLOGICALLY COMPLEX WORDS IN L2 SPANISH

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Rebecca Foote
Rebecca Foote*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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.

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 39 , Issue 4 , December 2017 , pp. 735 - 767
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

REFERENCES

Alegre, M., & Gordon, P. (1999). Frequency effects and the representational status of regular inflections. Journal of Memory and Language, 40, 41–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Amenta, S., & Crepaldi, D. (2012). Morphological processing as we know it: An analytical review of morphological effects in visual word identification. Frontiers in Psychology, 3, 232.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Baayen, R. H., Davidson, D. J., & Bates, D. M. (2008). Mixed-effects modeling with crossed random effects for subjects and items. Journal of Memory and Language, 59, 390–412.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baayen, H., Dijkstra, T., & Schreuder, R. (1997). Singulars and plurals in Dutch: Evidence for a parallel dual-route model. Journal of Memory and Language, 37, 94–117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baayen, H., & Schreuder, R. (Eds.). (2003). Morphological structure in language processing. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Babcock, L., Stowe, J. D., Maloof, C. J., Brovetto, C., & Ullman, M. T. (2012). The storage and composition of inflected forms in adult-learned second language: A study of the influence of length of residence, age of arrival, sex, and other factors. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 15, 820–840.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barr, D. J., Levy, R., Scheepers, C., & Tily, H. J. (2013). Random effects structure for confirmatory hypothesis testing: Keep it maximal. Journal of Memory and Language, 68, 255–278.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Basnight-Brown, D. M., Chen, L., Hua, S., Kostić, A., & Feldman, L. B. (2007). Monolingual and bilingual recognition of regular and irregular English verbs: Sensitivity to form similarity varies with first language experience. Journal of Memory and Language, 57, 65–80.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bates, D., Maechler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2015). lme4: Linear mixed-effects models using “Eigen” and S4 (Version 1.1–9) [Computer software]. Retrieved from https://github.com/lme4/lme4/.Google Scholar
Beck, M.-L. (1997). Regular verbs, past tense and frequency: Tracking down a potential source of NS/NNS competence differences. Second Language Research, 13, 93–115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bentin, S., & Feldman, L. B. (1990). The contribution of morphological and semantic relatedness to repetition priming at short and long lags: Evidence from Hebrew. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A: Human Experimental Psychology, 42, 691–711.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boudelaa, S., & Marslen-Wilson, W. D. (2005). Discontinuous morphology in time: Incremental masked priming in Arabic. Language and Cognitive Processes, 20, 207–260.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bowden, H. W., Gelfand, M. P., Sanz, C., & Ullman, M. T. (2010). Verbal inflectional morphology in L1 and L2 Spanish: A frequency effects study examining storage versus composition. Language Learning, 60, 44–87.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Clahsen, H. (1990). The comparative study of first and second language development. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 12, 135–153.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clahsen, H., Balkhair, L., Schutter, J.-S., & Cunnings, I. (2013). The time course of morphological processing in a second language. Second Language Research, 29, 7–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clahsen, H., Felser, C., Neubauer, K., Sato, M., & Silva, R. (2010). Morphological structure in native and nonnative language processing. Language Learning, 60, 21–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coughlin, C. E., & Tremblay, A. (2015). Morphological decomposition in native and non-native French speakers. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 18, 524–542.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DeKeyser, R. (2000). The robustness of critical period effects in second language acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 22, 499–534.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Domínguez, A., Segui, J., & Cuetos, F. (2002). The time-course of inflexional morphological priming. Linguistics, 40, 235–259.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ellis, N. C., & Sagarra, N. (2010). The bounds of adult language acquisition: Blocking and learned attention. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 32, 553–580.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feldman, L. B. (2000). Are morphological effects distinguishable from the effects of shared meaning and shared form? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 26, 1431–1444.Google ScholarPubMed
Feldman, L. B., Kostić, A., Basnight-Brown, D. M., Filipović Durdević, D., & Pastizzo, M. J. (2010). Morphological facilitation for regular and irregular verb formations in native and non-native speakers: Little evidence for distinct mechanisms. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 13, 119–135.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Feldman, L. B., Milin, P., Cho, K. W., Moscoso del Prado Martín, F., & O’Connor, P. A. (2015). Must analysis of meaning follow analysis of form? A time course analysis. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9, 1–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foote, R. (2010). Age of acquisition and proficiency as factors in language production: Agreement in bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 13, 99–118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foote, R. (2015). The production of gender agreement in native and L2 Spanish: The role of morphophonological form. Second Language Research, 31, 343–373.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Forster, K. I., & Forster, J. C. (2003). DMDX: A Windows display program with millisecond accuracy. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers, 35, 116–124.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Forster, K. I., Mohan, K., & Hector, J. (2003). The mechanics of masked priming. In Kinoshita, S. & Lupker, S. J. (Eds.), Masked priming: State of the art (pp. 3–37). New York: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Frisson, S., Bélanger, N. N., & Rayner, K. (2014). Phonological and orthographic overlap effects in fast and masked priming. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 67, 1742–1767.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Frost, R., Forster, K. I., & Deutsch, A. (1997). What can we learn from the morphology of Hebrew? A masked-priming investigation of morphological representation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 23, 829–856.Google ScholarPubMed
Frost, R., Kugler, T., Deutsch, A., & Forster, K. I. (2005). Orthographic structure versus morphological structure: Principles of lexical organization in a given language. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 31, 1293–1326.Google Scholar
Frost, R., Deutsch, A., Gilboa, O., Tannenbaum, M., & Marslen-Wilson, W. (2000). Morphological priming: Dissociation of phonological, semantic, and morphological factors. Memory and Cognition, 28, 1277–1288.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gor, K., & Cook, S. (2010). Nonnative processing of verbal morphology: In search of regularity. Language Learning, 60, 88–126.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gor, K., & Jackson, S. (2013). Morphological decomposition and lexical access in a native and second language: A nesting doll effect. Language and Cognitive Processes, 28, 1065–1091.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hankamer, J. (1989). Morphological parsing and the lexicon. In Marslen-Wilson, W. D. (Ed.), Lexical representation and process (pp. 392–408). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hawkins, R., & Chan, C. (1997). The partial accessibility of Universal Grammar in second language acquisition: The “failed formal features hypothesis.” Second Language Research, 13, 187–226.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haznedar, B., & Schwartz, B. D. (1997). Are there optional infinitives in child L2 acquisition? In Hughes, E., Hughes, M., & Greenhill, A. (Eds.), BUCLD 21 Proceedings (pp. 257–268). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Hopp, H. (2010). Ultimate attainment in L2 inflection: Performance similarities between non-native and native speakers. Lingua, 120, 901–931.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hopp, H. (2013). Grammatical gender in adult L2 acquisition: Relations between lexical and syntactic variability. Second Language Research, 29, 33–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jacob, G., Fleischhauer, E., & Clahsen, H. (2013). Allomorphy and affixation in morphological processing: A cross-modal priming study with late bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 16, 924–933.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jiang, N. (2004). Morphological insensitivity in second language processing. Applied Psycholinguistics, 25, 603–634.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, J. S., & Newport, E. L. (1989). Critical period effects in second language learning: The influence of maturational state on the acquisition of English as a second language. Cognitive Psychology, 21, 60–99.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kempley, S. T., & Morton, J. (1982). The effects of priming with regularly and irregularly related words in auditory word recognition. British Journal of Psychology, 73, 441–454.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kirkici, B., & Clahsen, H. (2013). Inflection and derivation in native and non-native language processing: Masked priming experiments on Turkish. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 16, 776–791.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lardiere, D. (1998). Dissociating syntax from morphology in a divergent L2 end-state grammar. Second Language Research, 14, 359–375.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lehtonen, M., & Laine, M. (2003). How word frequency affects morphological processing in monolinguals and bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 6, 213–225.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lehtonen, M., Niska, H., Wande, E., Niemi, J., & Laine, M. (2006). Recognition of inflected words in a morphologically limited language: Frequency effects in monolinguals and bilinguals. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 35, 121–146.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lenth, R. (2015). lsmeans: Least-squares means (Version 2.19) [Computer software]. Retrieved from https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/lsmeans/index.html.Google Scholar
Marslen-Wilson, W. D. (2007). Morphological processes in language comprehension. In Gaskell, G. (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of psycholinguistics (pp. 175–193). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Marslen-Wilson, W. D., & Tyler, L. K. (1997). Dissociating types of mental computation. Nature, 387, 592–594.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Marslen-Wilson, W. D., Hare, M., & Older, L. (1993). Inflectional morphology and phonological regularity in the English mental lexicon. Proceedings of the 15th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 693–698). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Mason, S. (2014). Morphological composition in the oral production of verbs in L2 Spanish. Paper presented at Second Language Research Forum 2014, October, Columbia, SC.Google Scholar
McCarthy, C. (2008). Morphological variability in the comprehension of agreement: An argument for representation over computation. Second Language Research, 24, 459–486.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McClelland, J. L., & Patterson, K. (2002). Rules or connections in past-tense inflections: What does the evidence rule out? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6, 465–472.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
McDonald, J. L. (2006). Beyond the critical period: Processing-based explanations for poor grammaticality judgment performance by late second language learners. Journal of Memory and Language, 55, 381–401.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meisel, J. (1997). The acquisition of the syntax of negation in French and German: Contrasting first and second language development. Second Language Research, 13, 227–263.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Murphy, V. A. (2004). Dissociable systems in second language inflectional morphology. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 26, 433–459.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Napps, S. E. (1989). Morphemic relationships in the lexicon: Are they distinct from semantic and formal relationships? Memory and Cognition, 17, 729–739.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Neubauer, K., & Clahsen, H. (2009). Decomposition of inflected words in a second language: An experimental study of German participles. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 31, 403–435.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pinker, S. (1999). Words and rules: The ingredients of language. New York, NY: Harper Collins.Google Scholar
Pinker, S., & Ullman, M. T. (2002). The past and future of the past tense. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6, 456–463.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pliatsikas, C., & Marinis, T. (2013). Processing of regular and irregular past tense morphology in highly proficient second language learners of English: A self-paced reading study. Applied Psycholinguistics, 34, 943–970.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Portin, M., Lehtonen, M., & Laine, M. (2007). Processing of inflected nouns in late bilinguals. Applied Psycholinguistics, 28, 135–156.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Presson, N., Sagarra, N., MacWhinney, B., & Kowalski, J. (2013). Compositional production in Spanish second language conjugation. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 16, 808–828.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prévost, P., & White, L. (2000). Missing surface inflection or impairment in second language acquisition? Evidence from tense and agreement. Second Language Research, 16, 103–133.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
R Development Core Team (2015). R: A language and environment for statistical computing (Version 3.2.2) [Computer software]. Retrieved from http://www.R-project.org.Google Scholar
Robert, C., & Mathey, S. (2012). The effect of prime duration in masked orthographic priming depends on neighborhood distribution. Language and Speech, 55, 249–262.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rueckl, J. G., Mikolinski, M., Raveh, M., Miner, C. S., & Mars, F. (1997). Morphological priming, fragment completion, and connectionist networks. Journal of Memory and Language, 36, 382–405.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rumelhart, D. E., & McClelland, J. L. (1986). On learning the past tenses of English verbs. In McClelland, J. L. & Rumelhart, D. E. (Eds.), Parallel distributed processing (Vol. 2): Psychological and biological models (pp. 216–271). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sánchez-Casas, R., Igoa, J. M., & García-Albea, J. E. (2003). On the representation of inflections and derivations: Data from Spanish. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 32, 621–668.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sandra, D., & Taft, M. (Eds.) (1994). Morphological structure, lexical representation, and lexical access. Hove, UK: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Schachter, J. (1990). On the issue of completeness in second language acquisition. Second Language Research, 6, 93–124.Google Scholar
Sebastián Gallés, N., Cuetos, F., Carreiras, M., & Martí, M. A. (2000). Léxico informatizado del español. Barcelona, Spain: University of Barcelona.Google Scholar
Seidenberg, M. S., & McClelland, J. L. (1989). A distributed, developmental model of word recognition and naming. Psychological Review, 96, 523–568.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Silva, R., & Clahsen, H. (2008). Morphologically complex words in L1 and L2 processing: Evidence from masked priming experiments in English. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 11, 245–260.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Singmann, H., Bolker, B., & Westfall, J. (2015). afex: Analysis of factorial experiments (Version 0.14–2) [Computer software]. Retrieved from https://github.com/singmann/afex.Google Scholar
Sonnenstuhl, I., Eisenbeiss, S., & Clahsen, H. (1999). Morphological priming in the German mental lexicon. Cognition, 72, 203–236.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Stanners, R. F., Neiser, J. J., Hernon, W. P., & Hall, R. (1979). Memory representation for morphologically related words. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 18, 399–412.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stockall, L., & Marantz, A. (2006). A single route, full decomposition model of morphological complexity: MEG evidence. The Mental Lexicon, 1, 85–123.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taft, M. (1979). Recognition of affixed words and the word frequency effect. Memory & Cognition, 7, 263–272.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Taft, M. (2004). Morphological decomposition and the reverse base frequency effect. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 57A, 745–765.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tsimpli, I., & Dimitrakopoulou, M. (2007). The interpretability hypothesis: Evidence from wh-interrogatives in second language acquisition. Second Language Research, 23, 215–242.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ullman, M. T. (2005). A cognitive neuroscience perspective on second language acquisition: The declarative/procedural model. In Sanz, C. (Ed.), Mind and context in adult second language acquisition (pp. 141–178). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Ullman, M. T., Pancheva, R., Love, T., Yee, E., Swinney, D., & Hickok, G. (2005). Neural correlates of lexicon and grammar: Evidence from the production, reading, and judgment of inflection in aphasia. Brain and Language, 93, 185–238.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
White, L., Valenzuela, E., Kozlowska-Macgregor, M., & Leung, Y.-K. I. (2004). Gender agreement in nonnative Spanish: Evidence against failed features. Applied Psycholinguistics, 25, 105–133.CrossRefGoogle Scholar