Effects Of L2 Learners’ Language Proficiency On Lexical Processing Of English Derivational Words

Over the past forty years,an increasing number of empirical studies have focused on the processing of morphologically complex words.Most studies currently focus on whether they are decomposed during processing and which factors affect the processing process,but there is no consensus yet.It is still unclear how semantic and orthographic information participate in the early processing of derived words,and whether the processing path of second language learners is the same as or different from that of first language learners.Although there has been some progress in studying the processing of derived words for second language learners,most of these studies have focused on learners whose first language is an alphabetic language similar to English,and there are limited studies on Mandarin,a language with a completely different writing system.In addition,some L1 studies have focused on language proficiency claiming this variable may be an important factor influencing the different research conclusions in previous studies.Therefore,this paper aims to explore the early processing path of English derived words for Chinese learners and the impact of language proficiency.In this study,a masked priming task with an a stimulus onset asynchrony(SOA)of 50ms was used,with the suffix-derived word as the prime and the morpheme of the derived word as the target.Fifty-three high-level English learners were selected as participants,with an average age of 23.2 years,including 43 females and 10 males.The results showed that both semantically transparent primes(e.g.,teacher),semantically opaque primes(e.g.,corner),and orthographically controlled primes(e.g.,pillow)all showed significant priming effects.Unexpectedly,in the study of individual differences in language proficiency,it was found that superior spelling relative to vocabulary was not associated with a change in the differences in priming magnitude for opaque relative to transparent pairs.However,better spelling ability was related to both the facilitation of orthographic priming effects and the inhibition of pure semantic priming effects.Based on these findings,this paper concludes that,unlike native speakers(who show priming effects for transparent and opaque primes but not for orthographic primes),second language learners do not show significant differences in priming effects for transparent,opaque,and orthographic primes.Therefore,while second language learners are also able to decompose suffix-derived words,they are less sensitive to morphological information than native speakers and rely more on overlapping orthography between words.