The role of form in morphological priming: Evidence from bilinguals

Abstract

This article explores how bilinguals perform automatic morphological decomposition processes, focusing on within- and cross-language masked morphological priming effects. In Experiment 1, unbalanced Spanish (L1)–English (L2) bilingual participants completed a lexical decision task on English targets that could be preceded by morphologically related or unrelated derived masked English and Spanish prime words. The cognate status of the masked Spanish primes was manipulated, in order to explore to what extent form overlap mediates cross-language morphological priming. In Experiment 2, a group of balanced native Basque–Spanish speakers completed a lexical decision task on Spanish targets preceded by morphologically related or unrelated Basque or Spanish masked primes. In this experiment, a large number of items were tested and the cognate status was manipulated according to a continuous measure of orthographic overlap, allowing for a fine-grained analysis of the role of form overlap in cross-language morphological priming. Results demonstrated the existence of between-language masked morphological priming, which was exclusively found for cognate prime-target pairs. Furthermore, the results from balanced and unbalanced bilinguals were highly similar showing that proficiency in the two languages at test does not seem to modulate the pattern of data. These results are correctly accounted for by mechanisms of early morpho-orthographic decomposition that do not necessarily imply an automatic translation of the prime. In contrast, other competing accounts that are based on translation processes do not seem to capture the present results.