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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 24, No. 0, pp.483-495
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 31 Jan 2024
Received 28 Nov 2023 Revised 27 Dec 2023 Accepted 13 May 2024
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.24..202404.483

A Masked Priming Study on Morphological Parsing in Lexical Access by Korean Learners of L2 English

Jeonghwa Shin
Associate Professor Department of English Korea Military Academy 574 Hwarang-Ro, Nowon-gu Seoul 01805, Korea jshinling@gmail.com


© 2024 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This study examines how word composition and phonological transparency affect the processing of L2 lexical items. To investigate this, Korean-speaking learners of English were engaged in a lexical decision task using a forward masked priming paradigm. The task involved three types of words: regular inflections, phonologically transparent derivations, and phonologically opaque derivations (e.g., boil, blind, brutal). During the experiment, participants were presented with a forward mask (######), followed by a prime word (e.g., boiled), and finally a target word (e.g., BOIL). Participants had to make lexical decisions for the target word. The prime word was identical to the target word (e.g., boil-BOIL), a suffixed form (e.g., boiled-BOIL), or unrelated (e.g., troll-BOIL). The results showed no significant differences in accuracy across the different word types. However, the response latency was longest for phonologically opaque derivations, followed by regular inflections, and shortest for phonologically transparent derivations. Additionally, the unrelated prime resulted in the longest response latency, while the suffixed prime led to longer reaction times than the identical prime. This priming effect was only observed for derivations, particularly phonologically transparent ones. These findings suggest that the processing of English derivational words by Korean L2 English speakers involves morphological decomposition, with a higher parsing cost for phonologically opaque derivations compared to phonologically transparent ones. In contrast, inflected forms did not show evidence of structural parsing in the L2 learners, indicating that regular inflections are stored as whole words by Korean learners of English.

Keywords:

forward masked priming, lexical decision, morphological decomposition, L2 lexical access

Acknowledgments

This study was supported by 2023 research fund of Korea Military Academy (Hwarangdae Research Institute) (RN: 2023B1020). I also would like to appreciate the useful comments that three reviewers provided for this paper. Any remaining errors are my own.

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