Wu Zhaohong, Fricke Melinda
School of English and International Studies, Beijing Foreign Studies University, No. 2 North Xisanhuan Road, Haidian District, Beijing, 100089, China.
Department of Linguistics, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, USA.
Cogn Process. 2025 Jun 24. doi: 10.1007/s10339-025-01288-3.
For both native speakers and second language (L2) learners, variation in the relative order of acquisition of inflectional morphemes has been shown in the literature. Previous studies employing the simple lexical decision task have also shown effects of suffixal characteristics on word recognition of both derived and inflected words such that some inflectional suffixes trigger whole-word processing while others contribute to decomposition. Additionally, evidence from the masked priming paradigm shows that suffixal characteristics affect the efficiency of morphological decomposition of derived words during early-stage processing. However, very little work has systematically examined the early stages of processing inflected words with different suffixes, leaving our understanding of the factors that impact the early-stage processing of inflected words incomplete at best. We argue that the overwhelming focus on the past tense -ed suffix in previous L2 studies risks exacerbating already serious generalizability issues in the realm of L2 research. Future studies would therefore do well to include and compare a wider range of inflectional suffixes, which may well require looking beyond English. This is essential for the field to make progress toward a more complete understanding of the processing of morphologically complex words.
对于以英语为母语者和第二语言（L2）学习者而言，文献中已表明屈折语素习得的相对顺序存在差异。以往采用简单词汇判断任务的研究也表明，后缀特征对派生词和屈折词的单词识别有影响，即一些屈折后缀会触发整词加工，而另一些则有助于分解。此外，来自掩蔽启动范式的证据表明，后缀特征会影响派生词在早期加工阶段的形态分解效率。然而，很少有研究系统地考察带有不同后缀的屈折词的早期加工阶段，这使得我们对影响屈折词早期加工的因素的理解充其量是不完整的。我们认为，以往二语研究中对过去式-ed后缀的过度关注，可能会加剧二语研究领域中业已严重的可推广性问题。因此，未来的研究最好纳入并比较更广泛的屈折后缀，这可能需要超越英语范围去研究。这对于该领域在更全面理解形态复杂词的加工方面取得进展至关重要。
