Amenta Simona, Foppolo Francesca, Badan Linda
Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, p.zza dell'Ateneo Nuovo 1, 20126 Milan, Italy.
During the conceptualization of this work and data collection, Simona Amenta was affiliated with the Department of Experimental Psychology of Gent University, Gent, Belgium.
J Cogn. 2025 Jan 7;8(1):14. doi: 10.5334/joc.420. eCollection 2025.
The productive use of morphological information is considered one of the possible ways in which speakers of a language understand and learn unknown words. In the present study we investigate if, and how, also adult L2 learners exploit morphological information to process unknown words by analyzing the impact of language proficiency in the processing of novel derivations. Italian L2 learners, divided into three proficiency groups, participated in a lexical decision where pseudo-words could embed existing stems (e.g., le), suffixes (e.g., hett), or both (novel derivations, e.g., ). Participants with low proficiency exhibited reduced accuracy and longer reaction times when presented with pseudo-words embedding a stem compared to those embedding a suffix. Conversely, participants with high proficiency demonstrated comparable accuracy in rejecting pseudo-words with real stems or real suffixes but required more time to reject pseudo-words embedding a suffix. In the case of novel derivations, accuracy (i.e., correct rejection) decreased and reaction time increased for all proficiency groups. Our results show that L2 learners exploit morphological information to process novel words. Most importantly, the ability to extract and exploit morphological information is linked to language proficiency.
有效利用形态学信息被认为是一种语言的使用者理解和学习未知单词的可能方式之一。在本研究中，我们通过分析语言熟练程度在处理新派生词时的影响，来调查成年二语学习者是否以及如何利用形态学信息来处理未知单词。将意大利二语学习者分为三个熟练程度组，他们参与了一项词汇判断任务，其中伪词可以嵌入现有的词干（如le）、后缀（如hett）或两者皆有（新派生词，如 ）。与嵌入后缀的伪词相比，低熟练程度的参与者在面对嵌入词干的伪词时，准确率降低且反应时间更长。相反，高熟练程度的参与者在拒绝带有真实词干或真实后缀的伪词时表现出相当的准确率，但拒绝嵌入后缀的伪词需要更多时间。在新派生词的情况下，所有熟练程度组的准确率（即正确拒绝率）都下降了，反应时间增加了。我们的结果表明，二语学习者利用形态学信息来处理新单词。最重要的是，提取和利用形态学信息的能力与语言熟练程度相关。
