Processing morphologically complex words in second-language learners: The effect of proficiency

Liang, Lijuan; Chen, Baoguo

doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2014.04.009

Cited by 38 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…Results showed rule-based decomposition in L2 learners. Liang and Chen (2014) investigated the effect of L2 proficiency on processing L2 morphologically complex words in Chinese learners of English. ERP results showed that highly proficient L2 learners demonstrated the priming effect within 350–550 ms in the morphological condition, associating with an N400 reduction, while less proficient L2 learners showed no morphological priming effect within the N400 range.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Parallel morpho-orthographic and morpho-semantic activation in processing second language morphologically complex words: Evidence from Chinese-English bilinguals

Zhang

Liang

Yao

et al. 2016

International Journal of Bilingualism

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Objectives/research questions: The present study focused on the performance of Chinese learners of English to investigate the activation of morpho-semantic information in the early processing of second language (L2) morphologically complex words when participants' first language (L1) and L2 are typologically different. Methodology: We used forward masked priming paradigm to compare the priming effect in three prime conditions, semantically transparent, semantically opaque and semantically related. In Experiment 1, the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was 40 milliseconds (ms), while, In Experiment 2, the SOA was extended to 80 ms. Data and analysis: Reaction time and comprehension accuracy data were analysed using the linear mixed-effects model. Findings/conclusions: In Experiment 1, we only found a priming effect in the semantically transparent condition. In Experiment 2, we found a reliable priming effect in the semantically opaque condition, but not in the semantically related condition. These results suggest even Chinese learners of English whose native language is typologically different from English can

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Parallel morpho-orthographic and morpho-semantic activation in processing second language morphologically complex words: Evidence from Chinese-English bilinguals

Zhang

Liang

Yao

et al. 2016

International Journal of Bilingualism

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“…The impact of proficiency on morphological processing with Chinese-English bilinguals was examined by Liang and Chen (2014) who found significant behavioral priming of regular inflected words (e.g., walked-WALK) and evidence for morphological priming from highly proficient Chinese-English bilinguals in the form of an attenuated N400 component but not from less proficient L2 learners. Such research might not be relevant to the current study, however, because it looked at inflected rather than derived words.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Thus, the processing of derived words and inflected words may well be different (e.g., see Taft, 2004). For example, sensitivity to inflectional information (as shown by Liang and Chen, 2014) might arise from learning a set of rules (e.g., "add an s to pluralize" in English) or from memorizing an inflectional paradigm (Silva & Clahsen, 2008), whereas sensitivity to derivational structures requires knowledge of relevant affixes and the contexts in which they are appropriately used. Given how little we know about the recognition of English derived words by Chinese-English bilinguals, the issue merits investigation.…”

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confidence: 99%

The Processing of English Derived Words by Chinese‐English Bilinguals

Taft

2017

Language Learning

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This study examined the sensitivity of Chinese‐English bilinguals to derivational word structure in English. In the first experiment, English monolinguals showed masked priming effects for prime‐target pairs related both transparently (e.g., hunter‐HUNT) and opaquely (e.g., corner‐CORN) but not for those related purely in terms of form (e.g., freeze‐FREE), whereas bilinguals showed priming in all three conditions. Furthermore, stronger form priming was found for bilinguals who were less experienced in English. A second experiment showed that bilingual participants found it harder to identify items as nonwords when the words possessed a suffix (e.g., animalful) than when they did not (e.g., animalfil), and this was true in terms of accuracy even for bilinguals with less exposure to English. Overall, these findings suggest that Chinese‐English bilinguals, regardless of proficiency, have some sensitivity to morphological structure and that greater proficiency leads to priming effects that tend to pattern more like those of monolinguals.

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“…They were native Chinese speakers of Chinese (L1) and highly proficiency in the English language (all started to learn English around 12 years old in the first year of middle school), and have normal or corrected-to-normal vision. We evaluated participants’ English proficiency on the basis of College English Test Band 6 (CET 6) (see also Liang and Chen, 2014 ; Zhang et al, 2014 ), which is an important examination in evaluating English proficiency in the public ( Jin and Yang, 2006 ). All participants passed the test with the scores more than 550, representing a high proficiency English level.…”

Section: Experiments 1: Phonological Effect Of Context Pictures Using mentioning

confidence: 99%

It Is Not Necessary to Retrieve the Phonological Nodes of Context Objects for Chinese Speakers

Zhang

Zhu

2016

Front. Psychol.

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The issue of how activation is transmitted from semantic to phonological level in spoken production remains controversial. Recent evidences from alphabetic languages support a cascaded view. However, given the different architecture of phonological encoding in non-alphabetic languages, it is not clear whether this view applies in Chinese, as a non-alphabetic script. We therefore investigated whether the not-to-be named pictures activate their phonological properties in Chinese speech production. In Experiment 1, participants were presented a target English word and a context picture (semantically related or unrelated, phonologically related or unrelated to target word in Chinese) and were asked to translate the English word into a Chinese word. The translation latencies were faster in the semantically related condition than in the unrelated condition. By contrast, no difference between phonologically related and unrelated was observed. In Experiment 2, in order to promote participants phonological sensitivity in a word-translation task, we increased the proportion of phonologically related trials from 25 to 50%. In Experiment 3, we employed a word association task that was more sensitive to phonological activation of context objects than a word translation task. The phonological activation of context objects were absent again in Experiments 2 and 3. Bayes Factor analysis suggested that the absence of phonological activation of context pictures was reliable. Results consistently revealed that only target lemma could activate the corresponding phonological node to guide articulation whereas no phonological activation of non-target lemma’s in Chinese. The present findings thus support a discrete model in Chinese spoken word production, which was contrastive with the cascaded view in alphabetic languages production.

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Processing morphologically complex words in second-language learners: The effect of proficiency

Cited by 38 publications

References 45 publications

Parallel morpho-orthographic and morpho-semantic activation in processing second language morphologically complex words: Evidence from Chinese-English bilinguals

Parallel morpho-orthographic and morpho-semantic activation in processing second language morphologically complex words: Evidence from Chinese-English bilinguals

The Processing of English Derived Words by Chinese‐English Bilinguals

It Is Not Necessary to Retrieve the Phonological Nodes of Context Objects for Chinese Speakers

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