ERIC Number: EJ887110
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2010-Apr
Pages: 17
Abstractor: As Provided
Reference Count: 0
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1366-7289
Morphological Facilitation for Regular and Irregular Verb Formations in Native and Non-Native Speakers: Little Evidence for Two Distinct Mechanisms
Feldman, Laurie Beth; Kostic, Aleksandar; Basnight-Brown, Dana M.; Durdevic, Dusica Filipovic; Pastizzo, Matthew John
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, v13 n2 p119-135 Apr 2010
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.
Descriptors: Verbs, Native Speakers, English (Second Language), English, Morphology (Languages), Comparative Analysis, Language Processing, Morphemes, Cues, Control Groups, Task Analysis, Language Patterns
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers: N/A

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