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.The major verbal inflectional affixes in English are -S, -ED, -ING. In addition, however, there are many irregularly inflected past tense forms (FELL, TAUGHT). There is considerable debate about whether native speakers understand and produce regular and irregular inflected verb forms in the same way. Less frequently investigated is how non-native speakers process the regular and irregular inflectional morphology of their second language (L2). The present study compares how native and non-native speakers of English recognize English verb forms. Non-native

In this study we introduce an information-theoretical formulation of the emergence of type-and token-based effects in morphological processing. We describe a probabilistic measure of the informational complexity of a word, its information residual, which encompasses the combined influences of the amount of information contained by the target word and the amount of information carried by its nested morphological paradigms. By means of re-analyses of previously published data on Dutch words we show that the information residual outperforms the combination of traditional token-and type-based counts in predicting response latencies in visual lexical decision, and at the same time provides a parsimonious account of inflectional, derivational, and compounding processes. q

We used a cross-modal priming procedure to explore the processing of irregular and regular English verb forms in both monolinguals and bilinguals (Serbian-English, Chinese-English). Materials included irregular nested stem (drawn-DRAW), irregular change stem (ran-RUN), and regular past tense-present tense verb pairs that were either low (guided-GUIDE) or high (pushed-PUSH) in resonance, a measure of semantic richness. Overall, semantic richness of irregular verbs (nested and irregular change) and of regular verbs (high and low resonance) was matched. Native speakers of English revealed comparable facilitation across regularity and greater facilitation for nested than change stem irregulars. Like native speakers, Serbian, but not Chinese bilinguals matched for proficiency, showed facilitation due to form overlap between irregular past and present tense forms with a nested stem. Unlike native speakers, neither group showed reliable facilitation to stem change irregulars. Results demonstrate the influence of first language on inflectional processing in a second language.Keywords semantic density; language transfer; morphological facilitation; cross modal priming; regular past tense formations; irregular past tense formations; mastery of inflection in a second language There is a long-standing debate in the word recognition literature as to whether native speakers of a language process irregular (e.g., ran-run) and regular (e.g., walked-walk) verb forms by common (single) or different (dual-route) mechanisms. Those who advocate a single processing system argue that processing of all words benefits from the extent to which words that are similar in form tend to be similar in meaning (

The lexical representation of Serbo-Croatian nouns was investigated in a lexical decision task. Because Serbo-Croatian nouns are declined, a noun may appear in one of several grammatical cases distinguished by the inflectional morpheme affixed to the base form. The grammatical cases occur with different frequencies, although some are visually and phonetically identical. When the frequencies of identical forms are compounded, the ordering of frequencies is not the same for masculine and feminine genders. These two genders are distinguished further by the fact that the base form for masculine nouns is an actual grammatical case, the nominative singular, whereas the base form for feminine nouns is an abstraction in that it cannot stand alone as an independent word. Exploiting these characteristics of the SerboCroatian language, we contrasted three views of how a noun is represented: (1) the independententries hypothesis, which assumes an independent representation for each grammatical case, reflecting its frequency of occurrence; (2) the derivational hypothesis, which assumes that only the base morpheme is stored, with the individual cases derived from separately stored inflectional morphemes and rules for combination; and (3) the satellite-entries hypothesis, which assumes that all cases are individually represented, with the nominative singular functioning as the nucleus and the embodiment of the noun's frequency and around which the other cases cluster uniformly. The evidence strongly favors the satellite-entries hypothesis.Inflection is the major grammatical device of SerboCroatian, Yugoslavia's principal language. In general, the grammatical cases of nouns are formed by adding a suffix to a root morpheme, where the suffix is of the vowel, vowel-consonant, or vowel-consonant-vowel type. Less frequently, inflection involves additional processes, such as vowel deletion and consonant palatalization.The grammatical cases of Serbo-Croatian nouns produced by inflection are not equal in their frequency of occurrence. Table I summarizes the frequency analysis of D. Kostic (1965) on a corpus of approximately 2 million Serbo-Croatian words appearing in the daily press and contemporary poetry. The nonitalicized numbers are actual percentages. Thus, for all nouns in the corpus, 12.83% were masculine nouns in the nominative singular, 7.8% were feminine nouns in the genitive singular, .13% were neuter nouns in the instrumental plural, and so on. Reading the totals, we