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 use the association between various measures of the morphological family and decision latencies to reveal the way in which the components of Dutch and English compounds are processed. The results show that for constituents of concatenated compounds in both languages, a position-related token count of the morphological family plays a role, whereas English open compounds show an effect of a type count, similar to the effect of family size for simplex words. When Dutch compounds are written with an artificial space, they reveal no effect of type count, which shows that the differential effect for the English open compounds is not superficial. The final experiment provides converging evidence for the lexical consequences of the space in English compounds. Decision latencies for English simplex words are better predicted from counts of the morphological family that include concatenated and hyphenated but not open family members.

This study uses the masked priming procedure to compare the decompositionality of regular with irregular English past tense forms relative to both an unrelated baseline and a baseline matched on orthographic similarity to the morphological prime. Morphological facilitation varies with the degree of similarity between related primes and targets. Discrepancies between unrelated and orthographic baselines arise when prime and target match in length and form overlap is high. The outcome demonstrates the key role of baselines in assessments of morphological facilitation and highlights problems of interpretation when evidence of morphological decomposition depends on meeting a statistical criterion for significant morphological facilitation.

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The influence of word familiarity on word recognition has been very well established in the literature. Familiarity can be measured in a number of ways, typically in the form of written frequency, subjective ratings, or age of acquisition. In general, words that are more familiar are recognized more rapidly than those words that are less familiar (e.g., word frequency- Alegre & Gordon, 1999;Connine & Mullennix, 1990; age of acquisition-Dewhurst, Hitch, & Barry, 1998;Gerhand & Barry, 1998). When other factors such as word length are held constant, high frequency words or words acquired at an earlier age are recognized faster than low frequency words or words acquired at a later age. It should be noted that typically, the earliest words acquired are learned through conversation. Moreover, throughout a lifetime, most individuals (presumably) encounter words more often in speech than in texts, and this reality highlights the importance of suitable spoken counts to analyze speechbased word familiarity. Although written frequency counts are readily available (most notably, Francis & Ku era, 1982;Ku era & Francis, 1967), few (if any) spoken counts exist for American English. The present paper reports the construction of a 1.6 million word spoken frequency database tagged for speaker attributes such as gender and age.The use of spoken word frequency counts is conspicuously absent in the literature, presumably due to a lack of appropriate frequency counts for American English. The most notable spoken frequency database is based on a British English corpus of 190,000 words (which included 10,630 different words) that were recorded without the direct knowledge of the speaker (Brown, 1984). Given the inherent difficulty of speech transcription for the purpose of generating spoken counts, the Brown (1984) corpus is commendable, although still considerably smaller in scope than typical written frequency databases (e.g., Ku era & Francis, 1967, collected over 1 million words representative of over 40,000 different words). The discrepancy in scope between spoken and written counts in conjunction with the absence of a large-scale spoken frequency database in American English motivated the construction of a new spoken frequency database. Spoken English CorpusOur spoken frequency counts were derived from the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE). The corpus is available online, and includes 152 transcriptions of lectures, meetings, advisement sessions, public addresses, and other educational conversations recorded at the University of Michigan (Simpson, Swales, & Briggs, 2002). On average, each of the 152 transcriptions contains approximately 11,000 words spoken by students, faculty, and other staff members in a variety of academic fields. The speakers ranged in age and gender and a majority of the speakers were educated native speakers of American English with a small percentage of nonnative speakers. In total, the transcripts derive from approximately 190 hours of recordings made between 1997 and 2001. Further info...

Two semantic variables, concreteness and morphological family size, were examined in a single word and a primed lexical decision task. Single word recognition latencies were faster for concrete relative to abstract targets only when morphological family size was small. The magnitude of morphological facilitation for primes related by inflection was greater than by derivation although both revealed a very similar interaction of concreteness and family size. In summary, concreteness influenced morphological processing so as to produce slower decision latencies for small family abstract than concrete words both in a single word and in a morphologically primed context. However, magnitudes of facilitation in isolation from baselines provided an incomplete account of morphological processing.