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L1 AND L2 WORD RECOGNITION IN FINNISH

Examining L1 Effects on L2 Processing of Morphological Complexity and Morphophonological Transparency

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2013

Seppo Vainio ,
Anneli Pajunen  and
Jukka Hyönä
Seppo Vainio*
Affiliation:
University of Turku
Anneli Pajunen
Affiliation:
University of Tampere
Jukka Hyönä
Affiliation:
University of Turku
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Seppo Vainio, Department of Psychology, University of Turku, FIN-20014 Turku, Finland. E-mail: sepvai@utu.fi
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Abstract

This study investigated the effect of the first language (L1) on the visual word recognition of inflected nouns in second language (L2) Finnish by native Russian and Chinese speakers. Case inflection is common in Russian and in Finnish but nonexistent in Chinese. Several models have been posited to describe L2 morphological processing. The unified competition model (UCM; MacWhinney, 2005) predicts L1-L2 transfer, whereas processability theory (Pienemann, 1998) posits a universal hierarchy in L2 acquisition regardless of the L1. The morphological decomposition deficiency hypothesis (Ullman, 2001b; VanPatten, 2004) claims that nonnatives cannot morphologically decompose words. Finally, DeKeyser (2005) proposes that morphophonological transparency affects nonnative processing. The current study explores which model best accounts for the processing of L2 Finnish by native Russian and Chinese speakers. The materials included simple nouns, transparently inflected nouns, and semitransparently inflected nouns. The results showed that Finns and Russians had longer reaction times (RTs) for morphologically complex nouns, but Chinese had longer RTs for semitransparent nouns. The RT results support the UCM by showing a L1-L2 transfer. Furthermore, transparency influenced word recognition among nonnatives; they made the most errors with semitransparent nouns.

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Articles
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Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , March 2014 , pp. 133 - 162
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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