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

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.

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.