Processing of inflected nouns in late bilinguals

• Autores: Marja Portin, Minna Lehtonen, Matti Laine
• Localización: Applied psycholinguistics, ISSN 0142-7164, Vol. 28, Nº 1, 2007, págs. 135-156
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This study investigated the recognition of Swedish inflected nouns in two participant groups. Both groups were Finnish-speaking late learners of Swedish, but the groups differed in regard to their Swedish language proficiency. In a visual lexical decision task, inflected Swedish nouns from three frequency ranges were contrasted with corresponding monomorphemic nouns. The reaction times and error rates suggested morphological decomposition for low-frequency inflected words. Yet, both medium- and high-frequency inflected words appeared to possess full-form representations. Despite an overall advantage for the more proficient participants, this pattern was present in both groups. The results indicate that even late exposure to a language can yield such input representations for morphologically complex words that are typical of native speakers.