Morphological Decomposition in Second Language Word Processing

Abstract

This paper made a masked priming experiment to examine the Chinese learners' online processing of English derivatives or derived words so as to find out the effect of morphological structures on second language (L2) word processing. 39 Chinese freshmen of non-English majors participated in the experiment. Results indicated that derivatives had significant priming effect on the identification of their stems and that this kind of priming effect was not affected by the brain's familiarity with it, which meant that like L1, L2 derivative processing was also affected by the morphological structures and that morphological decomposition did exist. This conclusion supports the view of Diependaele et al. that the characteristics of the target words determined their processing mechanism. In addition, the main factors that affect the complicated processing mechanism prove to be the features which are composed of the morphemes instead of the features of the whole words.