The impact of cognateness of word bases and suffixes on morpho-orthographic processing: A masked priming study with intermediate and high-proficiency Portuguese-English bilinguals
March
The impact of cognateness of word bases and suffixes on morpho-orthographic processing: A masked priming study with intermediate and high-proficiency Portuguese-English bilinguals
Montserrat Comesaña 1 2
Pauline Bertin 2
Helena Oliveira 1 2
Ana Paula Soares 1 2
Juan Andre s Herna ndez-Cabrera 0 2
Se verine Casalis 2
0 Department of Psychobiology and Methodology of Behavioral Sciences, University of La Laguna , Tenerife , Spain
1 Human Cognition Lab, CIPsi, School of Psychology, University of Minho, Braga, Portugal, 2 Cognitives Sciences and Affectives Sciences Lab, SCALab, Department of Psychology, University of Lille , Lille , France
2 Editor: Niels O. Schiller, Leiden University , NETHERLANDS
Recent studies have suggested that proficient bilinguals show morphological decomposition in the L2, but the question remains as to whether this process is modulated by the cognateness of the morphemic constituents of L2 words and by L2 proficiency. To answer this question was the main goal of the present research. For that purpose, a masked priming lexical decision task was conducted manipulating for the first time the degree of orthographic overlap of the L2 word as a whole, as well as of their morphemic constituents (bases and suffixes). Thirty-four European Portuguese-English bilinguals (16 intermediate and 18 highproficient) and 16 English native-speaking controls performed the task in English. Results revealed that both groups of bilinguals decomposed words as the native control group. Importantly, results also showed that morphological priming effects were sensitive not only to cross-language similarities of words as a whole, but also to their morphemic constituents (especially, suffixes).
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Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are
within the paper and its Supporting Information
files.
Funding: This research was conducted at
Psychology Research Centre (UID/PSI/01662/
2013), University of Minho and funded by the FCT
(Foundation for Science and Technology) through
the state budget, with reference IF / 00784/2013 /
CP1158 / CT0013. This has also been partially
Introduction
A number of studies in the monolingual domain across languages have shown that visual word
recognition is guided by morphological information (e.g., see [1±12]). For instance, an affixed
word such as package is assumed to be decomposed into its base and suffix components (pack
+ age, respectively) at early stages of visual word recognition.
A widely-used task to explore early morphological decomposition effects during lexical
access is the masked priming lexical decision task (e.g., [4, 13±19]). In this task, an upper-case
target word (e.g., PACK) is preceded by a lower-case prime for 50 ms or less, and participants
are asked to decide whether the target is or is not a real word. Primes can be morphologically
supported by the FCT and the Portuguese Ministry
of Science, Technology and Higher Education
through national funds and co-financed by FEDER
through COMPETE2020 under the PT2020
Partnership Agreement
(POCI-01-0145-FEDER007653). The funders had no role in study design,
data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or
preparation of the manuscript.
related to the targets (i.e., derived words, such as package-PACK) or unrelated in form and
meaning (e.g., fighter-PACK). Differences in latencies and accuracy between related and
unrelated conditions (priming effects) are taken as evidence of early and automatic morphological
decomposition during visual word recognition. Most research using this paradigm has
provided evidence for morphological priming effects both when prime-target pairs vary in their
degree of semantic transparency (i.e., the extent to which the meaning of a derived word can
be deduced from the meaning of their base and suffix; see [
20
]) and when pairs are not
semantically related (i.e., in opaque pairs like corner-CORN), although the magnitude of priming
tends to be larger for the former. For this reason, it has been suggested that the effect is
morpho-semantic and not simply morpho-orthographic (see, for instance, [
5
] or [
21
] for
overviews). Importantly, research also showed that priming effects do not occur when the primes
end in a set of letters that do not constitute an existing affix in the language, such as in
cashewCASH or turnip-TURN, in English (e.g., [
22
]). These results have supported a morphological
decomposition account which claims that there is an early segmentation of the word only
when the letter string ends in a real affix via an affix-stripping mechanism (e.g., [10, 23±28]; see
also [
29
], for a similar approach in the production domain). In the same vein, Diependaele
et al. [
4
] state that there are two distinct mechanisms involved in morphological processing
which operate in parallel: a) a purely form-based mechanism, that activates the base whenever
the visual input is fully decomposable into a base and a suffix (the morpho-orthographic
system); and b) (...truncated)