Morphological priming survives a language switch

Abstract

a b s t r a c tIn a long-lag morphological priming experiment, Dutch (L1)-English (L2) bilinguals were asked to name pictures and read aloud words. A design using non-switch blocks, consisting solely of Dutch stimuli, and switch-blocks, consisting of Dutch primes and targets with intervening English trials, was administered. Target picture naming was facilitated by morphologically related primes in both non-switch and switch blocks with equal magnitude. These results contrast some assumptions of sustained reactive inhibition models. However, models that do not assume bilinguals having to reactively suppress all activation of the non-target language can account for these data.

Accessing Words from the Mental Lexicon

“…Morphological priming effects are extremely robust, even surviving a language switch (Verdonschot et al 2012). For instance, reading aloud the Dutch compound tongzoen ('French kiss') or landtong ('finger of land') facilitated the naming of a picture of a tongue, even after 7-10 intervening naming trials and even when those intervening trials were in a different language (English in this case).…”

Distinct morphological processing of recently learned compound words: An ERP study

“…Stimuli were largely similar to Koester and Schiller (2008) and Verdonschot et al (2012). Target pictures were preceded by compound prime words from three prime types: related-familiar, related-novel and unrelated (listed in the Appendix).…”

“…Later studies Schiller, 2008, 2011) replicated these results in Dutch, demonstrating its robustness. Morphological priming effects were also found to survive a language switch (Lensink et al, 2014;Verdonschot et al, 2012). For instance, reading aloud the Dutch compound tongzoen ('French kiss') facilitated the naming of a picture of a tongue, even after 7-10 intervening naming trials and even when those intervening trials were in a different language (English in this case).…”

“…The procedure of the morphological priming task was similar to Verdonschot et al (2012) and Schiller's (2008, 2011); adapted from Dohmes et al, 2004). Participants were given 5 min to familiarize themselves with the pictures and their corresponding names by studying a booklet.…”

“…Repeatedmeasures ANOVAs with Greenhouse-Geisser corrections were used to analyze the ERP amplitudes. Based on the findings of previous studies with a similar experimental design (Koester and Schiller, 2008, Verdonschot et al, 2012Lensink et al, 2014), a basic prediction of our analysis is that a significant difference should be disclosed between morphologically related and unrelated conditions, both behaviorally and electrophysiologically. Based on this prediction, results in all cases were analyzed using a priori planned comparisons (Rosenthal and Rosnow, 1985).…”