This study presents a conceptual replication of Jacob et al.’s (2018) comparison of L2 early-stage processing of derived vs. inflected words. Previous studies on this issue focused predominantly on L2 learners from morphologically complex, alphabetic L1s, and generally showed L2 decompositional processing of derived but not inflected words. This replication study examined whether the previous claim for a qualitative difference in L2 early-stage processing of derived and inflected words could generalize to L2 English learners from a morphologically isolating, logographic L1, i.e., Chinese learners of L2 English. Results from a masked priming lexical decision task showed qualitatively the same magnitude of priming in the derivational, inflectional, and form control conditions for Chinese learners of English, suggesting reliance on surface form information in the early-stage processing of both derived and inflected words. Results of the current study add to the literature on L2 early-stage processing of derived vs. inflected words.

We investigate the effects of age and first language (L1) on the acquisition of verb morphology in L2 English by Chinese and Russian children learning English as a foreign language in EFL schools in Shanghai and Moscow. We tested children 5 years after they started their EFL classes and considered two groups in each country: one group started EFL classes at the age of 4 and was tested at the age of 9, while the other group started at 7 and was tested at 12. We assessed the production of 3SG-agreement and past tense using two elicited production tasks (TEGI). Our results show that later starters consistently outperform earlier starters. Unexpectedly, Chinese children showed higher accuracy with 3SG-agreement than their Russian counterparts. Finally, learners were more accurate with regular past tense than 3SG-agreement.