Morphological Decomposition by Second Language Learners: A German Masked Priming Study with Russian Native Speakers

Many recent masked priming studies examined visual recognition of morphologically complex words by native speakers and found evidence for their early automatic decomposition into constituent morphemes. However, it is not clear whether this mechanism applies to irregular inflections, or they are stored and processed as indecomposable whole forms. Moreover, research on non-native visual recognition of regular and irregular inflections provides highly controversial results. Additionally, some masked priming studies found that in contrast to native speakers, second language learners can show purely orthographic priming effects. In this study, we tested a group of highly proficient Russian learners of German to investigate their processing of regular and irregular German past participles. Morphologically related primes yielded significant facilitation of lexical decision response times to the targets in the non-native speakers, irrespective of regularity and stem allomorphy. However, statistical analysis could not reliably distinguish these effects from the effect of purely orthographic relatedness between control primes and targets. It suggests that orthographic information played a role in the non-native recognition process of inflected words.