Morphological facilitation for regular and irregular verb formations in native and non-native speakers: Little evidence for two distinct mechanisms.
The authors compared performance on two variants of the primed lexical decision task to investigate morphological processing in native and non-native speakers of English. They examined patterns of facilitation on present tense targets. Primes were regular (billed-bill) past tense formations and two types of irregular past tense forms that varied on preservation of target length (fell-fall; taught-teach). When a forward mask preceded the prime (Exp. 1), language and prime type interacted. Native speakers showed reliable regular and irregular length preserved facilitation relative to orthographic controls. Non-native speakers' latencies after morphological and orthographic primes did not differ reliably except for regulars. Under cross-modal conditions (Exp. 2), language and prime type interacted. Native but not non-native speakers showed inhibition following orthographically similar primes. Collectively, reliable facilitation for regulars and patterns across verb type and task provided little support for a processing dichotomy (decomposition, non-combinatorial association) based on inflectional regularity in either native or non-native speakers of English.
University at Albany, State University of New York, Haskins Laboratories.
Laurie Beth
LB
Feldman
Aleksandar
A
Kostić
Dana M
DM
Basnight-Brown
Dušica Filipović
DF
Durđević
Matthew John
MJ
Pastizzo