Masked constituent priming of English compounds in native and non-native speakers Academic Article

journal

  • Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

abstract

  • © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.The present research explores the degree of morphological structure of compound words in the native and non-native lexicons, and provides additional data on the access to these representations. Native and non-native speakers (L1 Spanish) of English were tested using a lexical decision task with masked priming of the compound’s constituents in isolation, including two orthographic conditions to control for a potential orthographic locus of effects. Both groups displayed reliable priming effects, unmediated by semantics, for the morphological but not the orthographic conditions as compared to an unrelated baseline. Results contribute further evidence of morphological structure in the lexicon of native speakers, and suggest that lexical representation and access in a second language are qualitatively comparable at relatively advanced levels of proficiency.

publication date

  • 2016-9-13

keywords

  • Compound Words
  • English Compounds
  • English People
  • Group
  • Isolation
  • Language
  • Lexical Access
  • Lexical Decision Task
  • Lexical Representation
  • Lexicon
  • Locus
  • Masked Priming
  • Morphological Structure
  • Native Speaker
  • Non-native Speakers
  • Orthographic
  • Population Groups
  • Priming
  • Proficiency
  • Semantics
  • evidence
  • semantics
  • social isolation

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

  • 2327-3798

number of pages

  • 17

start page

  • 1038

end page

  • 1054