Parallel morpho-orthographic and morpho-semantic activation in processing second language morphologically complex words: Evidence from Chinese-English bilinguals:

Objectives/research questions:The present study focused on the performance of Chinese learners of English to investigate the activation of morpho-semantic information in the early processing of second language (L2) morphologically complex words when participants’ first language (L1) and L2 are typologically different.Methodology:We used forward masked priming paradigm to compare the priming effect in three prime conditions, semantically transparent, semantically opaque and semantically related. In Experiment 1, the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was 40 milliseconds (ms), while, In Experiment 2, the SOA was extended to 80 ms.Data and analysis:Reaction time and comprehension accuracy data were analysed using the linear mixed-effects model.Findings/conclusions:In Experiment 1, we only found a priming effect in the semantically transparent condition. In Experiment 2, we found a reliable priming effect in the semantically opaque condition, but not in the semantically related condition. These results suggest e...