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Allomorphy and affixation in morphological processing: A cross-modal priming study with late bilinguals*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2013

GUNNAR JACOB ,
ELISABETH FLEISCHHAUER  and
HARALD CLAHSEN
GUNNAR JACOB
Affiliation:
Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism (PRIM), University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany
ELISABETH FLEISCHHAUER
Affiliation:
Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism (PRIM), University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany
HARALD CLAHSEN*
Affiliation:
Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism (PRIM), University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany
*
Address for correspondence: Harald Clahsen, Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism (PRIM), University of Potsdam, 14476 Potsdam, Germany[email protected]
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Abstract

This study presents results from a cross-modal priming experiment investigating inflected verb forms of German. A group of late learners of German with Russian as their native language (L1) was compared to a control group of German L1 speakers. The experiment showed different priming patterns for the two participant groups. The L1 German data yielded a stem-priming effect for inflected forms involving regular affixation and a partial priming effect for irregular forms irrespective of stem allomorphy. By contrast, the data from the late bilinguals showed reduced priming effects for both regular and irregular forms. We argue that late learners rely more on lexically stored inflected word forms during word recognition and less on morphological parsing than native speakers.

Keywords

bilingual processingmorphological primingsecond languageGerman morphology
Type
Research Notes
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 16 , Issue 4 , October 2013 , pp. 924 - 933
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

*

The research reported here was supported by an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship to Harald Clahsen and a Cusanuswerk postgraduate studentship to Elisabeth Fleischhauer. We are grateful to three anonymous BLC reviewers and the members of the Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism for detailed and helpful comments on the present work, and to the Jewish community at Potsdam for support in recruiting participants.

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