The reality of hierarchical morphological structure in multimorphemic words

Second Language Users Exhibit Shallow Morphological Processing

“…Unrelated) and Language Group was significant, indicating that nonconstituent primes led to a significantly larger RT drop for the L2 group than for the L1 group, compared to unrelated primes. This significant interaction was in line with within-group analyses for L2 (see Table 4a) and L1 data (see Table A1 in Song et al, 2019): The coefficient of Prime Type (Nonconstituent) in the left-branching condition was only significant in the L2 group, indicating that a significant nonconstituent priming only occurred in the L2 group. Furthermore, when we directly compared the mean RTs in the constituent and nonconstituent conditions for the L2 group (by running again the model reported in Table 4a with the reference level of Prime Type switched to Nonconstituent from Unrelated), they did not significantly differ (β = À0.004, t(420.19) = À0.15, p > 0.10).…”

“…Furthermore, when we directly compared the mean RTs in the constituent and nonconstituent conditions for the L2 group (by running again the model reported in Table 4a with the reference level of Prime Type switched to Nonconstituent from Unrelated), they did not significantly differ (β = À0.004, t(420.19) = À0.15, p > 0.10). In contrast, in the L1 group, the mean RT in the constituent condition was significantly shorter than that in the nonconstituent condition (β = À0.09, t(362.50) = À3.44, p < 0.001), as reported in Song et al (2019). All these results are consistent with Figure 2, where in the L2 group, the mean RT dropped slightly further in the nonconstituent condition than in the constituent condition (compared to the unrelated condition), while in the L1 group, it dropped far less in the nonconstituent condition than in the constituent condition.…”

“…Against this background, the present study tests SSH by investigating L2 processing of trimorphemically derived English words. Specifically, we test whether nonnative English speakers show the same morphological-structural priming as was observed in Song et al (2019) for native English speakers. In the current study, speakers of L2 English (L1 Cantonese) were tested using the same experimental paradigm and stimuli as Song et al (2019).…”

“…For example, the results of Bertram et al's (2011) eye-tracking study showed that the online processing of trimorphemic compounds slowed down when a hyphen was inserted at the minor constituent boundary (e.g., foot-ballassociation for [[foot-[ball]]association]), whereas the processing did not slow down when such insertion was made at the major constituent boundary (football-association). 1 More recently, using a crossmodal priming paradigm, Song et al (2019) demonstrated that recognition of English trimorphemic derived words (e.g., unkindness) was facilitated immediately after their bimorphemic substrings were processed if the substrings were structural constituents of the target words (e.g., unkind), and not if they were nonconstituents (e.g., kindness). Note that morphological constituents are nested within the morphological structure of targets, whereas nonconstituents are not.…”

“…Error bars indicate standard errors. L1 data are fromSong et al (2019). Statistical significance codes: *** = p < .001, ** = p < .01, * = p < .05, n.s.…”