The time-course of cross-language morphological activation in Korean-English bilinguals: Evidence from a masked priming experiment.

Abstract

A masked priming experiment with three prime durations (36, 48, and72 ms) was conducted to examine the time course of cross-language activationof constituent morphemes in Korean-English bilingual readers. Results showed that real suffixed words in Korean L1 as the primessignificantly facilitated responses for the corresponding English L2translated stems at all prime durations. In contrast, suffixed pseudowordprimes (i.e., an illegal combination of a stem and a suffix) inKorean elicited a significant priming effect on English L2 stems onlywhen the prime duration was 48 or 72 ms. These results suggest thatthere is an early cross-language activation of constituent morphemes inmorphological complex words in bilingual reading. However, the timecourse of the decompositional process is dependent upon the lexicalityof the complex words. The early morphological processing in bilingualreaders may be driven by supralexical analysis, whereas sublexical analysisof complex words occurs later in cross-language activation in bilingualreading.