Morphological Decomposition in German-English Bilinguals

Abstract

This collaborative study with Mirjana Bozic (Psychology, Cambridge) and Julia Schwarz (Basque Centre on Cognition, Brain and Language) investigates the processing and representation of morphologically-complex derived words by German-English bilinguals in their second language (English), compared to English monolinguals. Previous research on native German speakers has found decompositional processing and representation of all derived words irrespective of their semantic transparency, with semantically opaque verbs priming their stems (e.g. verstehen ‘understand’ - STEHEN ‘stand’) comparably to semantically transparent verbs. However, research in English has found no overt priming for opaque relationships between morphologically complex primes and their stem targets, suggesting that only transparent words might be decomposed in English. To this end we investigated whether German-English bilinguals tested in their L2 English behave similarly to English speakers, or whether they also decompose morphologically complex words across the transparency spectrum, like in their native German. The study used a cross-modal priming paradigm, with auditory primes (e.g. disagree) followed by visual targets (AGREE). Participants completed a lexical decision task across four conditions: semantically opaque, semantically transparent, form/phonological and unrelated. Preliminary results revealed a significant effect of priming and condition, with the priming effect also varying by condition. There was no main effect of group but there was a significant three-way interaction between group, condition, and prime type, indicating that the priming pattern across conditions differed between bilinguals and monolinguals. Priming was considerably more prominent in transparent than in opaque pairs, in line with previous results in English. Yet while bilinguals showed the same overall pattern as monolinguals, their priming effects were of a significantly larger magnitude, suggesting greater sensitivity to word structure in German-English bilinguals.