Viviani Eva, Crepaldi Davide
International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), Via Bonomea 265, 34136, Trieste, Italy.
University of Oxford, Oxford, England.
J Cogn. 2022 May 9;5(1):30. doi: 10.5334/joc.221. eCollection 2022.
In one's native language, visual word identification is based on early morphological analysis and is sensitive to the statistical structure of the mapping between form and meaning (Orthography-to-Semantic Consistency, OSC). How these mechanisms apply to a second language is much less clear. We recruited L1 Italian-L2 English speakers for a masked priming task where the relationship between prime and target was morphologically transparent, e.g., , morphologically opaque, e.g., , or merely orthographic, e.g., . Critically, participants underwent thorough testing of their lexical, morphological, phonological, spelling, and semantic proficiency in their second language. By exploring a wide spectrum of L2 proficiency, we showed that this factor critically qualifies L2 priming. Genuine morphological facilitation only arises as proficiency grows, while orthographic priming shrinks as L2 competence increases. OSC was also found to modulate priming and interact with proficiency, providing an alternative way of describing the transparency continuum in derivational morphology. Overall, these data illustrate the trajectory towards a fully consolidated L2 lexicon and show that masked priming and sensitivity to OSC are key trackers of this process.
在母语中，视觉单词识别基于早期形态分析，并且对形式与意义之间映射的统计结构（正字法到语义一致性，OSC）敏感。而这些机制如何应用于第二语言则不太清楚。我们招募了以意大利语为母语、以英语为第二语言的人来进行一项掩蔽启动任务，其中启动刺激与目标刺激之间的关系在形态上是透明的，例如 ，在形态上是不透明的，例如 ，或者仅仅是正字法上的，例如 。至关重要的是，参与者接受了对其第二语言的词汇、形态、语音、拼写和语义能力的全面测试。通过探索广泛的第二语言能力范围，我们表明这个因素对第二语言启动有至关重要的限定作用。真正的形态促进作用仅随着能力的增长而出现，而正字法启动则随着第二语言能力的提高而缩小。还发现OSC调节启动并与能力相互作用，为描述派生形态学中的透明度连续体提供了另一种方式。总体而言，这些数据说明了通向完全巩固的第二语言词汇的轨迹，并表明掩蔽启动和对OSC的敏感性是这一过程的关键追踪指标。
