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Article published In: The Mental Lexicon
Vol. 11:1 (2016) ► pp.26–54

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Accessing Morphosyntax in L1 and L2 Word Recognition

A Priming Study of Inflected German Adjectives

 | Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism
 | Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism
Published online: 16 June 2016
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.11.1.02bos
In fusional languages, inflectional affixes may encode multiple morphosyntactic features such as case, number, and gender. To determine how these features are accessed during both native (L1) and non-native (L2) word recognition, the present study compares the results from a masked visual priming experiment testing inflected adjectives of German to those of a previous overt (cross-modal) priming experiment on the same phenomenon. While for the L1 group both experiments produced converging results, a group of highly-proficient Russian L2 learners of German showed native-like modulations of repetition priming effects under overt, but not under masked priming conditions. These results indicate that not only affixes but also their morphosyntactic features are accessible during initial form-based lexical access, albeit only for L1 and not for L2 processing. We argue that this contrast is in line with other findings suggesting that non-native language processing is less influenced by structural information than the L1.
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