Chinese Learners’ Processing of Nominal Suffixes in Korean

This study investigates how L2 learners process morphologically complex words to see whether L2 processing of inflectional morphology is similar to L1 processing. Chinese learners of Korean, all of whom had studied Korean for more than one year and were regarded as advanced learners, participated in a lexical decision task of Korean words with primes of nominal suffixes. The results showed that no priming occurred for the plural marker as well as the morpho-syntactic case markers, which clearly demonstrated clear differences between L1 and L2 processing. The results suggest that adult L2 learners are less sensitive to morphological structure than native speakers and rely more on lexical storage than on morphological parsing during processing.