Using transposed-letter effects to investigate morphological processing in L1 and L2

Abstract

The experiments in this dissertation exploited the transposed-letter effect to investigate the status of the morpheme boundary at early, intermediate, and later stages of lexical access. It was observed that constituent morphemes are identified early in the process of word recognition. Effects of frequency and context on morphological processing were also explored. Frequency effects arose after identification of the morphological subunits, indicating decomposition is not contingent on frequency, but frequency does influence whether the morphemic subunits continue to play a role in lexical access after decomposition. Syntactic, but not semantic, context influenced morphological processing, with morphological decomposition occurring earlier when the morphological complexity was syntactically predictable. Morphological processing in second language learners was also investigated, and it was observed that learners are also sensitive to morphological structure, with the onset of that sensitivity contingent on experience in the second language. Learners’ morphological processing was not sensitive to the effects of context.