Bilingual compound processing: The effects of constituent frequency and semantic transparency (original) (raw)
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Second Language Research, 2016
This article reports on a study investigating the relative influence of the first language and dominant language (L1) on second language (L2) and third language (L3) morpho-lexical processing. A lexical decision task compared the responses to English NV-er compounds (e.g. taxi driver) and non-compounds provided by a group of native speakers and three groups of learners at various levels of English proficiency: L1 Spanish – L2 English sequential bilinguals and two groups of early Spanish–Basque bilinguals with English as their L3. Crucially, the two trilingual groups differed in their first and dominant language (i.e. L1 Spanish – L2 Basque vs. L1 Basque – L2 Spanish). Our materials exploit an (a)symmetry between these languages: while Basque and English pattern together in the basic structure of (productive) NV-er compounds, Spanish presents a construction that differs in directionality as well as inflection of the verbal element (V[3SG] + N). Results show between and within group d...
Compound processing in second language acquisition of English
Journal of the European Second Language Association, 2017
An unresolved question in second language (L2) acquisition research is whether L2 learners differ from native speakers in their use of morphological information in accessing multimorphemic words. L2 compound studies are of particular importance for this line of research because compounds, as words which are predominantly composed of two free morphemes, enable researchers to investigate how semantic transparency, morphological headedness and frequency influence complex word processing. Studies with native speakers have revealed semantic transparency and headedness as two factors influencing constituent-based decompositional processing; whereas studies with L2 learners have so far revealed inconsistent reliance on these factors. The present study investigates this issue via a masked priming experiment testing English noun-noun compound processing by L1-Turkish-speaking learners of English (advanced and intermediate-level learners) and by native speakers of English. Findings suggest that native-like morphological decomposition is possible with increasing L2 proficiency.
Morphological encoding in the production of compound words in Mandarin Chinese
Journal of Memory and Language, 2006
The present study investigated whether morphological encoding is involved in the production of Chinese disyllabic transparent compound words. The implicit priming task of Meyer (1990) was adopted. The first three experiments (Experiment 1A, 1B, and 2) determined that shared orthography or shared meaning alone did not produce the kind of preparation effect typically observed with the task. A potential morphological priming effect was then assessed in Experiment 3 by contrasting the preparation effect of a character/morpheme prime with that of a pronunciation-matched tonal syllable prime. The effect was slightly larger (by 6 ms but not significantly) for the character/morpheme prime than for the tonal syllable prime. Experiment 4 manipulated the frequencies of the character/morpheme primes while controlling for their pronunciations. There was no frequency effect. The results, taken together, showed that in contrast to the Dutch findings, morphological encoding is at best minimally involved in the production of Chinese disyllabic transparent compound words.
The effect of morphemic homophony on the processing of Japanese two-kanji compound words
Reading and Writing, 2005
Two experiments investigated the effect of kanji morphemic homophony on lexical decision and naming. Effects were examined from both the left-hand and right-hand positions of Japanese two-kanji compound words. The number of homophones affected the processing of compound words in the same way for both tasks. For left-hand kanji, fewer morphemic homophones led to faster lexical decision and whole-word naming. For right-hand kanji, the number of morphemic homophones did not affect either lexical decision or naming. This effect of homophonic density suggested that, when a kanji-compound word is to be processed, phonological information of its kanji constituents is automatically activated and reverberates back to generate a series of orthographic representations of kanji morphemic homophones, but not in a completely parallel fashion.
This paper investigates the workings of the mental lexicon in bilinguals and examines how a bilingual speaker may store and compute different morphological structures of nouns. The study investigates the claim that recognising a translation from a compound to another compound should be faster and more accurate than recognising a translation from a compound to a monomorphemic word. The participants of the study were bilingual speakers of Swedish and English (N = 16) to whom a translation recognition task was administered consisting of backwards translation from their L2 (English) to their L1 (Swedish), where the English words were compound nouns and the Swedish words were either compound nouns or monomorphemic nouns. The items selected for the task consisted of 15 compound-to-compound translation equivalents, 15 compound-to-monomorphemic equivalents, and 30 filler pairs that were not translations and only indirectly contributed to the results. The positive items were all semantically transparent nouns, and the compounds all had Noun + Noun structure. All words were tested for length and frequency. The participants were presented with the task in the software DMDX and either accepted or rejected each translation pair as it was displayed. Their reaction time and error rate regarding the various translations were collected and analysed for patterns within the conditions of compound-to-compound and compound-to-monomorphemic translation. After the task, the participants were asked to fill in a frequency-based vocabulary test, self-evaluate their skills in English and complete a short questionnaire pertaining to their age of acquisition and daily use of the language. According to the findings, compound-to-compound recognition is on average quicker and results in fewer errors than recognition of an English compound to a Swedish monomorphemic word. This could mean that priming in the bilingual lexicon is restricted in terms of morphological structure; compounds activate each other cross-linguistically to a greater degree, whereas, even in proficient bilingual users, monomorphemic translation equivalents are not similarly associated. This reflects what is known as shared representations across language boundaries; a speaker expects translation equivalents to adhere to the same template, which facilitates recognition when this is the case.
Frontiers in psychology, 2016
This study examines the lexical representation and processing of noun-noun compounds and their grammatical gender during speech production in German, a language that codes for grammatical gender (masculine, feminine, and neuter). Using a picture-word interference paradigm, participants produced determiner-compound noun phrases in response to pictures, while ignoring written distractor words. Compound targets were either semantically transparent (e.g., birdhouse) or opaque (e.g., hotdog), and their constituent nouns either had the same or a different gender (internal gender match). Effects of gender-congruent but otherwise unrelated distractor nouns, and of two morphologically related distractors corresponding to the first or second constituent were assessed relative to a completely unrelated, gender-incongruent distractor baseline. Both constituent distractors strongly facilitated compound naming, and these effects were independent of the targets' semantic transparency. This sup...
The representation and processing of compounds words
De Gruyter eBooks, 2020
Compound words may be the language structures that are most fundamental to human linguistic ability and most revealing of its dynamics. We review evidence to date on the representation and processing of compound words in the mind and highlight the implications that they have for the broader understanding of language functioning and lexical knowledge. Our examination of the nature of compounds focuses on their deceptive simplicity as well as their dual nature as words and lexical combinations. Compound processing appears to be advantaged when compounds belong to morphologically productive families and when they are both formally and semantically transparent. We also claim that current findings offer converging evidence that compound word processing is characterized by both whole word and constituent activation for compound types.