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Morphological priming in bilingualism research

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Abstract

The review describes how morphological priming can be utilised to study the processing of morphologically complex words in bilinguals. The article starts with an overview of established experimental paradigms based on morphological priming, discusses a number of basic methodological pitfalls with regard to experimental design and materials, then reviews previous L2 morphological priming studies, and concludes with a brief discussion of recent developments in the field as well as possible future directions.

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... As we mentioned earlier, previous studies investigating inflection priming in L2 reading have primarily focused on isolated word recognition, but a consensus on its existence has yet to be reached (Jacob, 2018). The inclusion of L2 reading in our analysis presents a unique opportunity to investigate this phenomenon beyond the limitations of single-word reading paradigms. ...
... In line with the findings in L1 reading, no long-lag inflection priming effect was observed in Dutch students reading in English (their L2) either. In the Introduction, we offered a brief overview of the L2 morphological priming literature using isolated word presentation (based on Jacob, 2018). Part of the literature suggests that inflection priming is not found among L2 readers (e.g., Clahsen & Neubauer, 2010;Jacob, Fleischhauer, & Clahsen, 2013;Jacob et al., 2017;Kirkici & Clahsen, 2013;Neubauer & Clahsen, 2009;Silva & Clahsen, 2008), while other sources find that L2 and L1 readers demonstrate equally strong inflection priming (Basnight-Brown et al., 2007;Coughlin & Tremblay, 2014;De Grauwe et al., 2014;Diependaele et al., 2011;Feldman et al., 2010;Foote, 2015). ...
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Most of the empirical evidence that lays the ground for research on recognition of printed morphologically complex words comes from experimental paradigms employing morphological priming, e.g., exposure to morphologically related forms. Furthermore, most of these paradigms rely on context-less presentation of isolated words. We examined whether well-established morphological priming effects (i.e., faster recognition of a word preceded by a morphologically related word) are observable under more natural conditions of fluent text reading. Using the GECO database of eye-movements recorded during the reading of a novel, we examined the long-lag morphological and identity priming in one's first language (L1, English and Dutch) or second language (L2, English). While the effects of identity priming were ubiquitous, no evidence of morphological priming was observed in the L1 or L2 eye-movement record. We discuss implications of these findings for ecological validity and generalizability of select current theories of morphological processing.
... Gor, 2018), morphological (e.g. Jacob, 2018), syntactic (e.g. Hartsuiker and Bernolet, 2017;Van Gompel and Arai, 2018), and semantic priming (Tytus and Rundblad, 2016) have yielded detailed insight into mechanisms of bilingual language processing and production (Clahsen and Jacob, 2018). ...
... Jacob, 2018), syntactic (e.g. Hartsuiker and Bernolet, 2017;Van Gompel and Arai, 2018), and semantic priming (Tytus and Rundblad, 2016) have yielded detailed insight into mechanisms of bilingual language processing and production (Clahsen and Jacob, 2018). Priming paradigms have also been extensively used to investigate language acquisition, e.g. the development of syntactic representations in L1 (Peter and Rowland, 2019). ...
Poster
Memento Boot-camp 2020 Priming mechanisms in written and spoken translation
... It is also worth investigating whether combining novel word stems with derivational morphemes (e.g., vishist, vishment, vishity), as opposed to the inflectional forms that were presently used (e.g., vishing, vished, vishes) makes a difference in learning and decomposing novel words as well as generating the orthographic skeleton in both L1 and L2 speakers of English. This can contribute to the mixed literature showing differences of morphological priming effects in processing inflected words in L1 vs. L2 but not necessarily in processing derived words (Jacob, 2018;Reifegerste et al., 2019;Silva & Clahsen, 2008). We suspect that German native speakers are naturally more reliant on German than English phoneme-grapheme correspondences, suggesting that the previously evidenced spelling-by-predictability interaction in English monolinguals (Beyersmann et al., 2021;Wegener et al., 2018), Spanish native speakers (Jevtović et al., 2022) and French native speakers (Jevtović et al., 2023) should be replicable in German monolinguals. ...
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The present study asked whether oral vocabulary training can facilitate reading in a second language (L2). Fifty L2 speakers of English received oral training over three days on complex novel words, with predictable and unpredictable spellings, composed of novel stems and existing suffixes (i.e., vishing, vishes, vished). After training, participants read the novel word stems for the first time (i.e., trained and untrained), embedded in sentences, and their eye movements were monitored. The eye-tracking data revealed shorter looking times for trained than untrained stems, and for stems with predictable than unpredictable spellings. In contrast to monolingual speakers of English, the interaction between training and spelling predictability was not significant, suggesting that L2 speakers did not generate orthographic skeletons that were robust enough to affect their eye-movement behaviour when seeing the trained novel words for the first time in print.
... As seções a seguir trazem a definição de priming como componente de memória implícita e como estratégia metodológica nos campos da psicologia experimental e da psicolinguística. Efeitos de priming são observados em diversos aspectos da linguagem -sintaxe, estrutura informacional, semântica, pragmática, fonologia, morfologia, bilinguismo/plurilinguismo -e estudos em cada um destes enfoques contribuem para um melhor entendimento da arquitetura cognitiva por trás da capacidade humana da linguagem (BOCK, 1986;GOR, 2018;JACOB, 2018;GOLDBERG, 2013;MAHOWALD et al. 2016;RAFFRAY;PICKERING, 2010;VAN GOMPEL;ARAI, 2018). Este capítulo, entretanto, tem foco em priming estrutural, definido em termos gerais como uma facilitação da recuperação de estruturas sintáticas abstratas processadas anteriormente, manifestada em tempos menores na compreensão e na tendência em se reutilizar estas estruturas em episódios subsequentes de produção (BOCK, 1986;VAN GOMPEL;ARAI, 2018). ...
... As seções a seguir trazem a definição de priming como componente de memória implícita e como estratégia metodológica nos campos da psicologia experimental e da psicolinguística. Efeitos de priming são observados em diversos aspectos da linguagem -sintaxe, estrutura informacional, semântica, pragmática, fonologia, morfologia, bilinguismo/plurilinguismo -e estudos em cada um destes enfoques contribuem para um melhor entendimento da arquitetura cognitiva por trás da capacidade humana da linguagem (BOCK, 1986;GOR, 2018;JACOB, 2018;GOLDBERG, 2013;MAHOWALD et al. 2016;RAFFRAY;PICKERING, 2010;VAN GOMPEL;ARAI, 2018). Este capítulo, entretanto, tem foco em priming estrutural, definido em termos gerais como uma facilitação da recuperação de estruturas sintáticas abstratas processadas anteriormente, manifestada em tempos menores na compreensão e na tendência em se reutilizar estas estruturas em episódios subsequentes de produção (BOCK, 1986;VAN GOMPEL;ARAI, 2018). ...
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Reunindo contribuições de importantes pesquisadores, o livro Métodos Experimentais em Psicolinguística apresenta uma introdução a técnicas comumente utilizadas no Brasil em estudos sobre aquisição, processamento e produção da linguagem. Ideal para estudantes com interesse nessas áreas, o livro conta com capítulos que não apenas descrevem e exemplificam cada método, mas também discutem suas possíveis vantagens e desvantagens.
... Priming is the influence of recent experience with language on current processing of language. It takes place at multiple levels of language processing (e.g., semantic, structural, phonological, morphological, and orthographic), both within and across languages, in children and adults, and across different linguistic modalities (see Brysbaert et al. 1999;Frost et al. 2000;Jacob 2018;Lucas 2000;Pickering and Ferreira 2008;van Gompel and Arai 2018;van Hell and Tanner 2012;Van Heuven et al. 2001, for reviews and example studies). In the current paper, we focus specifically on structural priming. ...
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This book examines the young science of psycholinguistics, which attempts to uncover the mechanisms and representations underlying human language. This interdisciplinary field has seen massive developments over the past decade, with a broad expansion of the research base, and the incorporation of new experimental techniques such as brain imaging and computational modelling. The result is that real progress is being made in the understanding of the key components of language in the mind. This book brings together the views of seventy-five leading researchers to provide a review of the current state of the art in psycholinguistics. The contributors are eminent in a wide range of fields, including psychology, linguistics, human memory, cognitive neuroscience, bilingualism, genetics, development, and neuropsychology. Their contributions are organised into six themed sections, covering word recognition, the mental lexicon, comprehension and discourse, language production, language development, and perspectives on psycholinguistics.
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Research with native speakers indicates that, during word recognition, regularly inflected words undergo parsing that segments them into stems and affixes. In contrast, studies with learners suggest that this parsing may not take place in L2. This study’s research questions are: Do L2 Spanish learners store and process regularly inflected, morphologically complex words like native speakers? Does this depend on proficiency? Does type of inflection (verbal or adjectival) play a role? Native speakers, advanced learners, and intermediate learners of Spanish completed two lexical-decision tasks. Response times were measured to target words (verbs or adjectives) preceded by masked primes that were either identical to the targets, morphologically, orthographically, or semantically related, or unrelated. All groups responded more quickly to targets when they were preceded by identical and morphologically related primes than when they were preceded by unrelated primes, with no differences due to either proficiency or inflection type.
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A psycholinguistic account of human communication must explain how linguistic inputs and outputs are structured to convey the speaker's intended meaning. The concept of a "mental lexicon" plays a key role in standard conceptions of this process, referring to the learned representations that mediate between the spoken utterance (or written text) and the interpretation computed by the listener or reader. The organisation of these representations needs to reflect, broadly speaking, two kinds of linguistic information being communicated: semantic information, about meanings in the world; and a wide range of syntactic information, specifying grammatical relations, tense, aspect, and so forth. These different kinds of linguistic information are associated with specific lexical entities-words and morphemes-which are assembled together, in different ways in different languages, to convey the necessary mix of semantic and syntactic cues to intended meaning as the speech input is heard over time (or as a written text is read). This article discusses morphological processes in language comprehension, focusing on inflectional morphology and derivational morphology. It also considers morphological decomposition and lexical representation.
Article
Much previous experimental research on morphological processing has focused on surface and meaning-level properties of morphologically complex words, without paying much attention to the morphological differences between inflectional and derivational processes. Realization-based theories of morphology, for example, assume specific morpholexical representations for derived words that distinguish them from the products of inflectional or paradigmatic processes. The present study reports results from a series of masked priming experiments investigating the processing of inflectional and derivational phenomena in native (L1) and non-native (L2) speakers in a non-Indo-European language, Turkish. We specifically compared regular (Aorist) verb inflection with deadjectival nominalization, both of which are highly frequent, productive and transparent in Turkish. The experiments demonstrated different priming patterns for inflection and derivation, specifically within the L2 group. Implications of these findings are discussed both for accounts of L2 morphological processing and for the controversial linguistic distinction between inflection and derivation.
Article
In three experiments we compared the performance of native English speakers to that of Spanish–English and Dutch–English bilinguals on a masked morphological priming lexical decision task. The results do not show significant differences across the three experiments. In line with recent meta-analyses, we observed a graded pattern of facilitation across stem priming with transparent suffixed primes (e.g., viewer–view), opaque suffixed or pseudo-suffixed primes (e.g., corner–corn) and form control primes (e.g., freeze–free). Priming was largest in the transparent condition, smallest in the form condition and intermediate in the opaque condition. Our data confirm the hypothesis that bilinguals largely adopt the same processing strategies as native speakers (e.g., Lemhöfer et al., 2008), and constrain the hypothesis that bilinguals rely more heavily on whole-word processing in their second language (Clahsen, Felser, Neubauer, Sato, & Silva, 2010; Ullman, 2004, 2005). The observed pattern of morphological priming is in line with earlier monolingual studies, further highlighting the reality of semantic transparency effects in the initial stages of word recognition.
Article
This study reports results from psycholinguistic experiments (visual lexical decision, masked priming) examining the processing of derived German nouns with the nominalizing suffix –ung in adult native (L1) speakers of German and adult second language (L2) learners of German with Polish as L1. The pairings of experimental effects obtained for the two participant groups were different. Whilst the L1 group exhibited a response time advantage for high-frequency forms in unprimed lexical decision plus facilitated recognition of morphologically related items in masked priming, the L2 group demonstrated an even stronger surface-frequency effect than the L1 group in unprimed lexical decision, but no effect of morphological facilitation in the priming experiment. We will discuss the implications of these findings for understanding L1/L2 processing differences and, more generally, with respect to the significance of frequency effects for models of language representation and processing.
Article
Previous studies of long-term morphological priming have obtained a mixed pattern of results: Although some studies have found larger effects of inflected primes than of derived primes, others have found that inflections and derivations have equivalent effects. We reexamined this issue in four experiments in which the inflected and derived primes were paired with the same target words (e.g., believe, believed, believer) and were equated in terms of their orthographic similarity to the targets. Across these experiments, inflections and derivations consistently produced equivalent levels of priming, both in the word fragment completion task (Experiments 1 and 3) and in the lexical decision task (Experiments 2 and 4). The implications of these findings for current models of the processing of morphologically complex words are discussed.
Article
Previous studies haves shown that under masked priming conditions, CORNER primes CORN as strongly as TEACHER primes TEACH and more strongly than BROTHEL primes BROTH. This result has been taken as evidence of a purely structural level of representation at which words are decomposed into morphological constituents in a manner that is independent of semantics. The research reported here investigated the influence of semantic transparency on long-term morphological priming. Two experiments demonstrated that while lexical decisions were facilitated by semantically transparent primes like TEACHER, semantically opaque words like CORNER had no effect. Although differences in the nonword foils used in each experiment gave rise to somewhat different patterns of results, this difference in the effects of transparent and opaque primes was found in both experiments. The implications of this finding for accounts of morphological effects on visual word identification are discussed.
Article
There is little agreement on the mechanisms involved in second language (L2) processing of regular and irregular inflectional morphology and on the exact role of age, amount, and type of exposure to L2 resulting in differences in L2 input and use. The article contributes to the ongoing debates by reporting the results of two experiments on Russian verb generation and recognition in a lexical decision task (LDT) with priming by highly proficient late L2 learners, early interrupted (heritage) learners, and adult native speakers of Russian. Inflected verbs varying in regularity, type, and token (lemma) frequency were used. The experiments document the role of obligatory decomposition and complex allomorphy involved in (de)composition and mapping as well as type and token frequency in L1 and L2 verb generation and lexical access, with no sharp division between regular and irregular verbs. The results are inconsistent with either the dual-system or the single-system approach to morphological processing, and are compatible with “hybrid” theories combining rule-based decomposition and input-frequency-based probabilistic mechanisms. All of the verb types showed priming effects, both in native and nonnative lexical access. However, the degree of facilitation depended on decomposition costs for different verb types only in nonnative participants. The study also shows differences in early (heritage) and late L2 learners. In the production task, heritage speakers outperformed L2 learners in real, but not novel, verb generation and in the use of the regular default pattern, whereas L2 learners showed an advantage in the use of the cue-based complex morphological pattern. In the priming task, heritage speakers were faster than late L2 learners and insensitive to morphological complexity, whereas L2 learners showed longer latencies in response to the verbs with complex inflectional morphology. These differences are associated with the differences in their respective language learning backgrounds. It is tentatively suggested that these two groups of learners may rely on different processing mechanisms and, possibly, neural paths.
Article
Four experiments were conducted to investigate the memory status of inflectional forms of verbs (S, ED, ING), irregular past tense words, and adjective and nominal derivatives of verbs. The central question was whether inflections, irregular past tense forms, and derivatives have memory representations separate from their base verbs. The results indicated that inflections do not have memory representations separate from their base verbs but irregular past tense words and both types of derivatives do. While the latter three types of items seem to have separate memory entries for base verbs and their variations, the entries do not appear to be independent. There is evidence that accessing the variation results in activation of the representation for the base verb and that this activation is a necessary step in the processing of the variation.
Article
In the present study, we looked at cross-modal priming effects produced by auditory presentation of morphologically complex pseudowords in order to investigate semantic integration during the processing of French morphologically complex items. In Experiment 1, we used as primes pseudowords consisting of a non-interpretable combination of roots and suffixes, such as °sportation, formed by the noun sport “sport” and the suffix -ation. In Experiment 2, primes were semantically interpretable pseudowords made of the combination of a root and a suffix, such as °rapidifier “to quickify”. In Experiment 3, we used as primes semantically interpretable pseudowords that were designed to be synonymous with existing derived words, for example °cuisineur, which, if it existed, would mean the same as cuisinier “a cook”. Finally, in Experiment 4, we used as primes non-morphological pseudowords like °rapiduit, -uit being an existing ending of French but not a suffix. The results of the four experiments show that priming only occurs with those morphologically complex pseudowords which are interpretable (including those which are synonymous with a pre-existing derived form), providing evidence that semantic factors are taken into account when the prime is overtly presented. Our results further support the view that morphological effects come into play at at least two processing stages, a morphological decomposition based on formal properties and a semantic integration based on semantic compatibility between morphemes.