L1 and L2 processing of compound words: Evidence from masked priming experiments in English

• MAN LI ^[1] ; NAN JIANG ^[1] ; KIRA GOR ^[1]
  1. [1] University of Maryland
• Localización: Bilingualism: Language and cognition, ISSN 1366-7289, Vol. 20, Nº 2, 2017 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Cross-linguistic Priming in Bilinguals: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Language Processing, Acquisition and Change), págs. 384-402
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This study reports results from a series of masked priming experiments investigating early automatic processes involved in the visual recognition of English bimorphemic compounds in native and non-native processing. Results show that NSs produced robust and statistically equivalent masked priming effects with semantically transparent (e.g., toothbrush-TOOTH) and opaque (e.g., honeymoon-HONEY) compound primes, but no priming with orthographic controls (e.g., restaurant-REST), irrespective of constituent position. Similarly, advanced Chinese learners of English also produced robust and statistically equivalent priming effects with transparent and opaque compound primes in both positions. However, a clear orthographic priming effect was observed in the word-initial overlap position but no such effect in the word-final position. We argue that L2 compound priming originates from a different source from form priming. We conclude that these findings lend support to the sublexical morpho-orthographic decomposition mechanism underlying early English compound recognition not only in L1 but also in L2 processing.