Chinese Learners' L2 Morphological Processing of Final and Prefinal Endings in Korean Verbs

This study investigates how Chinese learners of Korean process morphologically complex words to see whether verbal suffixes are decomposed or processed as a whole. 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 final and prefinal verbal endings. The results of a visual priming experiment with the SOA of 160 ms showed that strong or full priming occurred for the past tense suffix, but no priming for the honorifics, which is different from Ll processing of Korean prefinal endings. This study revealed reduced priming effects for the final endings, which is also different from Korean Ll processing of the same endings. The results of the present study, however, showed priming effects for verbal suffixes similar to Chinese L2 learners' processing of Korean nominal suffixes.