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L1 and L2 processing of compound words: Evidence from masked priming experiments in English*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2015

MAN LI ,
NAN JIANG  and
KIRA GOR
MAN LI*
Affiliation:
University of Maryland
NAN JIANG
Affiliation:
University of Maryland
KIRA GOR
Affiliation:
University of Maryland
*
Address for correspondence: Man Li, School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, 3215 Jiménez Hall, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USAmanli@umd.edu
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Abstract

This study reports results from a series of masked priming experiments investigating early automatic processes involved in the visual recognition of English bimorphemic compounds in native and non-native processing. Results show that NSs produced robust and statistically equivalent masked priming effects with semantically transparent (e.g., toothbrush-TOOTH) and opaque (e.g., honeymoon-HONEY) compound primes, but no priming with orthographic controls (e.g., restaurant-REST), irrespective of constituent position. Similarly, advanced Chinese learners of English also produced robust and statistically equivalent priming effects with transparent and opaque compound primes in both positions. However, a clear orthographic priming effect was observed in the word-initial overlap position but no such effect in the word-final position. We argue that L2 compound priming originates from a different source from form priming. We conclude that these findings lend support to the sublexical morpho-orthographic decomposition mechanism underlying early English compound recognition not only in L1 but also in L2 processing.

Keywords

masked primingcompoundsmorphological processingEnglish as a second languagelate bilinguals

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Footnotes

*

We would like to thank Qian Zhou for her help with part of the data collection for this project. We would also like to thank Robert DeKeyser and the anonymous BLC reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. Any errors that remain are our own.

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