Hostname: page-component-7b9c58cd5d-v2ckm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-03-15T16:12:11.149Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Inflection and derivation in native and non-native language processing: Masked priming experiments on Turkish*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 November 2012

BILAL KIRKICI  and
HARALD CLAHSEN
BILAL KIRKICI
Affiliation:
Department of Foreign Language Education, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey
HARALD CLAHSEN*
Affiliation:
Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism (PRIM), University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany
*
Address for correspondence: Harald Clahsen, University of Potsdam, Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism, Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse 24–25, 14476 Potsdam, Germanyharald.clahsen@uni-potsdam.de
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Much previous experimental research on morphological processing has focused on surface and meaning-level properties of morphologically complex words, without paying much attention to the morphological differences between inflectional and derivational processes. Realization-based theories of morphology, for example, assume specific morpholexical representations for derived words that distinguish them from the products of inflectional or paradigmatic processes. The present study reports results from a series of masked priming experiments investigating the processing of inflectional and derivational phenomena in native (L1) and non-native (L2) speakers in a non-Indo-European language, Turkish. We specifically compared regular (Aorist) verb inflection with deadjectival nominalization, both of which are highly frequent, productive and transparent in Turkish. The experiments demonstrated different priming patterns for inflection and derivation, specifically within the L2 group. Implications of these findings are discussed both for accounts of L2 morphological processing and for the controversial linguistic distinction between inflection and derivation.

Keywords

morphological processingsecond languagelate bilinguals
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 16 , Issue 4 , October 2013 , pp. 776 - 791
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

The research reported here was supported by a British Academy Postdoctoral Visiting Fellowship to BK and by an Alexander-von-Humboldt Professorship to HC. We are grateful to the Turkish Learning and Research Center of Gazi University (Gazi TÖMER) in Ankara for providing us with lab space to test participants. We also thank Nihan Ketrez, three anonymous reviewers, and the members of the Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism for detailed and helpful comments on the present work.

References

Aksu-Koç, A., Ketrez, F. N., Laalo, K., & Pfeiler, B. (2007). Agglutinating languages: Turkish, Finnish, and Yucatec Maya. In Laaha, S. & Gillis, S. (eds.), Typological perspectives on the acquisition of noun and verb morphology (Antwerp Papers in Linguistics 112), pp. 47–57. Antwerp: University of Antwerp.Google Scholar
Anderson, S. R. (1992). A-morphous morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Baayen, R. H., Milin, P., Filipović Durdević, D., Hendrix, P., & Marelli, M. (2011). An amorphous model for morphological processing in visual comprehension based on naive discriminative learning. Psychological Review, 118, 438–482.Google Scholar
Boudelaa, S., & Marslen-Wilson, W. D. (2005). Discontinuous morphology in time: Incremental masked priming in Arabic. Language and Cognitive Processes, 20, 207–260.Google Scholar
Chen, L., Shu, H., Liu, Y., Zhao, J., & Li, P. (2007). ERP signatures of subject–verb agreement in L2 learning. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 10, 161–174.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chomsky, N. (1981). Lectures on Government and Binding: The Pisa Lectures. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Clahsen, H., Balkhair, L., Cunnings, I., & Schutter, J. S. (2012). The time course of morphological processing in a second language. Ms., Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism.Google Scholar
Clahsen, H., Eisenbeiss, S., Hadler, M., & Sonnenstuhl, I. (2001). The mental representation of inflected words: An experimental study of adjectives and verbs in German. Language, 77, 510–543.Google Scholar
Clahsen, H., & Felser, C. (2006). Grammatical processing in language learners. Applied Psycholinguistics, 27, 3–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clahsen, H., Felser, C., Neubauer, K., Sato, M., & Silva, R. (2010). Morphological structure in native and nonnative language processing. Language Learning, 60 (1), 21–43.Google Scholar
Clahsen, H., & Neubauer, K. (2010). Morphology, frequency, and the processing of derived words in native and nonnative speakers. Lingua, 120, 2627–2637.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clahsen, H., Sonnenstuhl, I., & Blevins, J. P. (2003). Derivational morphology in the German mental lexicon: A dual-mechanism account. In Baayen, H. & Schreuder, R. (eds.), Morphological structure in language processing, pp. 125–155. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Crepaldi, D., Rastle, K., Coltheart, M., & Nickels, L. (2010). “Fell” primes “fall”, but does “bell” prime “ball”? Masked priming with irregularly-inflected primes. Journal of Memory and Language, 63, 83–99.Google Scholar
Davis, M. H., & Rastle, K. (2010). Form and meaning in early morphological processing: Comment on Feldman, O'Connor and Moscoso del Prado Martín (2009). Psychonomic Bulletin Review, 17 (5), 749–755.Google Scholar
Diependaele, K., Duñabeitia, J. A., Morris, J., & Keuleers, E. (2011). Fast morphological effects in first and second language word recognition. Journal of Memory and Language, 64, 344–358.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Domínguez, A., Segui, J., & Cuetos, F. (2002). The time-course of inflectional morphological priming. Linguistics, 40 (2), 235–259.Google Scholar
Drews, E., & Zwitserlood, P. (1995). Orthographic and morphological similarity in visual word recognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 21 (5), 1098–1116.Google ScholarPubMed
Durgunoğlu, A. Y. (2006). Learning to read in Turkish. Developmental Science, 9 (5), 437–439.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Feldman, L. B. (1994). Beyond orthography and phonology: Differences between inflections and derivations. Journal of Memory and Language, 33, 442–470.Google Scholar
Feldman, L. B., O'Connor, P. A., & Moscoso del Prado Martín, F. (2009). Early morphological processing is morpho-semantic and not simply morphoorthographic: A violation of form-then-meaning accounts of word recognition. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 16 (4), 684–691CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feldman, L. B., Kostić, A., Basnight-Brown, D. M., Filipović Durdević, D., & Pastizzo, M. J. (2010). Morphological facilitation for regular and irregular verb formations in native and non-native speakers: Little evidence for two distinct mechanisms. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 13 (2), 119–135.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Forster, K. I., & Davis, C. (1984). Repetition priming and frequency attenuation in lexical access. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 10, 680–698.Google Scholar
Frauenfelder, U. H., & Schreuder, R. (1992). Constraining psycholinguistic models of morphological processing and representation: The role of productivity. In Booij, G. E. & van Marle, J. (eds.), Yearbook of morphology 1991, pp. 165–183. Dordrecht: Kluwer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frost, R., Forster, K. I., & Deutsch, A. (1997). What can we learn from the morphology of Hebrew: A masked priming investigation of morphological representation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 23, 829–856.Google Scholar
Grainger, J., Colé, P., & Segui, J. (1991). Masked morphological priming in visual word recognition. Journal of Memory and Language, 30, 370–384.Google Scholar
Gürel, A. (1999). Decomposition: To what extent? The case of Turkish. Brain and Language, 68 (1–2), 218–224.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hankamer, J. (1986). Finite state morphology and left to right phonology. In Dalrymple, M., Goldberg, J., Hanson, K., Inman, M., Piñon, C. & Wechsler, S. (eds.), Proceedings of the Fifth West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, pp. 29–34. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Hankamer, J. (1989). Morphological parsing and the lexicon. In Marslen-Wilson, W. D. (ed.), Lexical representation and process, pp. 392–408. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harley, H., & Noyer, R. (1999). State-of-the-article: Distributed morphology. GLOT, 4, 3–9.Google Scholar
Jackendoff, Ray. (1997). The architecture of the language faculty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Klein, W. (1991). SLA theory: Prolegomena to a theory of language acquisition and implications for theoretical linguistics. In Huebner, T. & Ferguson, C. (eds.), Crosscurrents in second language acquisition and linguistic theories, pp. 169–194. Amsterdam & Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kornfilt, J. (1997). Turkish. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Laudanna, A., Badecker, W., & Caramazza, A. (1992). Processing inflectional and derivational morphology. Journal of Memory and Language, 31, 333–348.Google Scholar
Levelt, W. J. M. (1999). Language production: A blueprint of the speaker. In Brown, C. & Hagoort, P. (eds.), The neurocognition of language, pp. 83–122. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Marslen-Wilson, W. D. (2007). Morphological processes in language comprehension. In Gaskel, G. (ed.), The Oxford handbook of psycholinguistics, pp. 175–193. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Marslen-Wilson, W. D., Bozic, M., & Randall, B. (2008). Early decomposition in visual word recognition: Dissociating morphology, form, and meaning. Language and Cognitive Processes, 23, 394–421.Google Scholar
Matthews, P. H. (1991). Morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McDonald, J. L. (2006). Beyond the critical period: Processing-based explanations for poor grammaticality judgment performance by late second language learners. Journal of Memory and Language, 55, 381–401.Google Scholar
Menges, K. H. (1968). The Turkic languages and people: An introduction to Turkic studies. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrasowitz.Google Scholar
Nakipoğlu, M., & Ketrez, N. (2006). Children's overregularizations and irregularizations of the Turkish Aorist. In Bamman, D., Magnitskaia, T. & Zaller, C. (eds.), Proceedings of the 30th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, pp. 399–410. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Neubauer, K., & Clahsen, H. (2009). Decomposition of inflected words in a second language: An experimental study of German participles. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 31 (3), 403–435.Google Scholar
Rastle, K., & Davis, M. H. (2003). Reading morphologically complex words: Some thoughts from masked priming. In Kinoshita, S. & Lupker, S. J. (eds.), Masked priming: The state of the art, pp. 279–305. New York & Hove: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Rastle, K., Davis, M. H., Marslen-Wilson, W. D., & Tyler, L. K. (2000). Morphological and semantic effects in visual word recognition: A time-course study. Language and Cognitive Processes, 15, 507–537.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rastle, K., Davis, M. H., & New, B. (2004). The broth in my brother's brothel: Morpho-orthographic segmentation in visual word recognition. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 11, 1090–1098.Google Scholar
Sabourin, L., & Haverkort, M. (2003) Neural substrates of representation and processing of a second language. In Van Hout, R., Hulk, A., Kuiken, F. & Towell, R. (eds.), The lexicon–syntax interface in second language acquisition, pp. 175–195. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Say, B., Zeyrek, D., Oflazer, K., & Özge, U. (2002). Development of a corpus and a Treebank for present-day written Turkish. In İmer, K. & Doğan, G. (eds.), Current research in Turkish linguistics: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Turkish Linguistics, pp. 183–192. Northern Cyprus: Eastern Mediterranean University.Google Scholar
Schneider, W., Eschman, A., & Zuccolotto, A. (2002). E-Prime user's guide. Pittsburgh, PA: Psychology Software Tools.Google Scholar
Schriefers, H., Friederici, A., & Graetz, P. (1992). Inflectional and derivational morphology in the mental lexicon: Symmetries and asymmetries in repetition priming. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 44, 373–390.Google Scholar
Silva, R., & Clahsen, H. (2008). Morphologically complex words in L1 and L2 processing: Evidence from masked priming experiments in English. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 11, 245–260.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stanners, R. F., Neiser, J. J., Hernon, W. P., & Hall, R. (1979). Memory representation for morphologically related words. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 18, 399–412.Google Scholar
Stump, G. T. (2001). Inflectional morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ullman, M. (2005). A cognitive neuroscience perspective on second language acquisition: The declarative/procedural model. In Sanz, C. (ed.), Mind and context in adult second language acquisition: Methods, theory and practice, pp. 141–178. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Wunderlich, D. (1996). Minimalist morphology: The role of paradigms. In Booij, G. E. & van Marle, J. (eds.), Yearbook of morphology 1995, pp. 93–114. Dordrecht: Kluwer.Google Scholar