L2 processing of morphologically complex words in Chinese

L2 processing of morphologically complex words in Chinese

This study investigated the L2morphological processing by examining whether L2 Chinese speakers are able to constructhierarchically structured representations of morphologically complex words as efficiently asL1 Chinese speakers. Additionally, the current study explored whether the prominence ofChinese morphemes influences L2 speakers’ engagement in native-like structural processingof complex words. To tap into the morphological decomposition in the early stage of lexicalprocessing, a masked-priming lexical decision task was employed. The findings of this studyalign with the Shallow Structure Hypothesis, which proposes that non-structural informationtakes priority over structural information in L2 processing. L2 speakers exhibited similarpriming patterns to L1 speakers for morphologically related prime-target pairs, but the L2participants also showed semantic and orthographic priming effects which were not foundin the L1 group. This indicates that L2 speakers heavily rely on semantic and orthographiccues, leading to enhanced priming effects for morphologically related prime-target pairs thatshare the initial two characters. These findings suggest that L2 processing of morphologicallycomplex words may prioritize non-structural information by relying more on lexical-semanticconnections and surface-level orthographic information rather than deep hierarchical structureprocessing.