The role of form in morphological priming: Evidence from bilinguals

Abstract

This article explores how bilinguals perform automatic morphological decomposition processes, focusing on within-and cross-language masked morphological priming effects. In Experiment 1, unbalanced Spanish (L1) -English (L2) bilingual participants completed a lexical decision task on English targets that could be preceded by morphologically related or unrelated derived masked English and Spanish prime words.The cognate status of the masked Spanish primes was manipulated, in order to explore to what extent form overlap mediates cross-language morphological priming. In Experiment 2, a group of balanced native Basque-Spanish speakers completed a lexical decision task on Spanish targets preceded by morphologically related or unrelated Basque or Spanish masked primes. In this experiment, a large number of items was tested and the cognate status was manipulated according to a continuous measure of orthographic overlap, allowing for a fine-grained analysis of the role of form overlap in cross-language morphological priming. Results demonstrated the existence of betweenlanguage masked morphological priming, which was exclusively found for cognate prime-target pairs. Furthermore, the results from balanced and unbalanced bilinguals were highly similar showing that proficiency in the two languages at test does not seem to modulate the pattern of data. These results are correctly accounted for by mechanisms of early morpho-orthographic decomposition that do not necessarily imply an automatic translation of the prime. In contrast, other competing accounts that are based on translation processes do not seem able to capture the present results.

Developmental changes associated with cross-language similarity in bilingual children

“…In the current study we replicated this cognate advantage in the translation recognition task using a continuous measure of the degree of cross-linguistic orthographic overlap (based on the length002Dcorrected Levenshtein distance; see Casaponsa et al, 2015;Duñabeitia et al, 2013;Schepens et al, 2011; see also Prior, Kroll, & MacWhinney, 2013, for an alternative approach).…”

Lexical organization of language-ambiguous and language-specific words in bilinguals

“…We used the length-corrected orthographic Levenshtein distance in order to restrict the cross-linguistic similarity between these words and their Spanish translation equivalents. This measure ranges between 0 and 1, where 0 corresponds to the minimum possible value in the cognate continuum (i.e., completely different translation equivalents at the form level), and 1 corresponds to fully overlapping cognates; see Casaponsa, Antón, Pérez, & Duñabeitia, in press;Duñabeitia et al, 2013;Schepens, Dijkstra, & Grootjen, 2012). We only selected words in the range from 0 to .6, avoiding extensive overlap across languages (mean=.17, SD=.13).…”

English compound and non-compound processing in bilingual and multilingual speakers: Effects of dominance and sequential multilingualism

“…While results are mixed, two main positions can be identified. The first assumes that native and nonnative processing of morphology may differ quantitatively (in processing speed and capacity) but not qualitatively (e.g., Diependaele et al, 2011;Duñabeitia et al, 2013). The second view maintains that native and nonnative speakers do employ substantially different mechanisms (e.g., Clahsen et al, 2013).…”