Native speakers like affixes, L2 speakers like letters? An overt visual priming study investigating the role of orthography in L2 morphological processing

In an overt visual priming experiment, we investigate the role of orthography in native (L1) and non-native (L2) processing of German morphologically complex words. We compare priming effects for inflected and derived morphologically related prime-target pairs versus otherwise matched, purely orthographically related pairs. The results show morphological priming effects in both the L1 and L2 group, with no significant difference between inflection and derivation. However, L2 speakers, but not L1 speakers, also showed significant priming for orthographically related pairs. Our results support the claim that L2 speakers focus more on surface-level information such as orthography during visual word recognition. This can cause orthographic priming effects in morphologically related prime-target pairs, which may conceal L1-L2 differences in morphological processing.

• Publication year

  2019

• Venue

  PLoS ONE

• Publication date

  2019-12-23

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Linguistics, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0226482PMID 31869374PMCID 6927598
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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