Author:
Cilibrasi Luca,Jiránková Lucie
Abstract
Previous work has shown that monolingual speakers of English are sensitive to the presence of inflectional morphology when it is applied to nonwords. For example, when a nonword ends in a sequence of phonemes that respect the morphophonological rules regulating tense inflection, speakers are slower in recognising it. In this study, we investigated whether a similar pattern applies to second language learners as well. 91 learners of English with Czech as L1 where presented with a same/different minimal pairs task containing nonwords with various endings (in one condition, a sequence of phonemes that could be interpreted as an inflectional morpheme). Consistently with research on monolingual participants, the study showed that also second language learners are slower in processing nonwords that contain potential inflectional morphemes. The pattern was observed from low levels of proficiency, suggesting that learners are sensitive to these rules from early stages of learning.
Reference29 articles.
1. Ambrus, L., Sunnqvist, C., Asp, M., Westling, S. & Westrin, Å. (2017). Coping and suicide risk in high risk psychiatric patients. Journal of Mental Health, 29(1), 27–32.
2. Anderson, J. D. & Byrd, C. T. (2008). Phonotactic probability effects in children who stutter. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 51, 851–66.
3. Baayen, R. H., Davidson, D. J. & Bates, D. M. (2008). Mixed-effects modeling with crossed random effects for subjects and items. Journal of Memory and Language, 59(4), 390–412. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2007.12.005
4. Bates, D., Maechler, M., Bolker, B. & Walker, S. (2015). lme4: Linear mixed-effects models using Eigen and S4. R package version 1.1–7. 2014. See https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/lme4/vignettes/lmer.pdf.
5. Beauvillain, C. (1994). Morphological structure in visual word recognition: Evidence from prefixed and suffixed words. Language and Cognitive Processes, 9(3), 317–39.