Fast morphological effects in first and second language word recognition

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 et al., 2010, Ullman, 2004 and Ullman, 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.

Research highlights
► We compare masked morphological priming in native and non-native word recognition.
► We find the same graded pattern of facilitation for transparent and opaque items.
► Morphological processing follows the same principles in L1 and L2.