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DECOMPOSITION OF INFLECTED WORDS IN A SECOND LANGUAGE

An Experimental Study of German Participles

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2009

Kathleen Neubauer  and
Harald Clahsen
Kathleen Neubauer
Affiliation:
University of Essex
Harald Clahsen*
Affiliation:
University of Essex
*
*Address correspondence to: Harald Clahsen, Department of Linguistics, University of Essex, Colchester, C04 3SQ, UK; e-mail: harald@essex.ac.uk.
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Abstract

German participles offer a distinction between regular forms that are suffixed with –t and do not exhibit any stem changes and irregular forms that all have the ending –n and sometimes undergo (largely unpredictable) stem changes. This article reports the results from a series of psycholinguistic experiments (acceptability judgments, lexical decision, and masked priming) that investigate regular and irregular participle forms in adult native speakers of German in comparison to advanced adult second language (L2) learners of German with Polish as their first language (L1). The most striking L1-L2 contrasts were found for regular participles. Although the L1 group’s performance was influenced by the combinatorial structure of regular participle forms, this was not the case for the L2 group. These findings 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.

Type
Research Articles
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 31 , Issue 3 , September 2009 , pp. 403 - 435
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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