Dr Sandra Kotzor

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions: This paper investigates whether sustained immersion in a dominant second-language (L2) environment alters morphological processing strategies compared to those of L1-immersed speakers. Furthermore, we assess the methodological usefulness of a language-mode task in light of the validity of conducting native processing research on L2-immersed speakers.

Design/methodology/approach: We use the design and stimuli of a previous long-lag visual lexical decision task conducted with native German speakers in Germany and use this group as a control. Thirty-two native German speakers resident in the UK (>2 years; minimal day-to-day German use) participated in two experimental sessions (one containing a 20-minute conversation task in German).

Data and analysis: The data shows clear differences between facilitation patterns of L1 and L2-immersed participants. L2-immersed speakers display decreased sensitivity to subtle morphological differences as well as facilitation in a form condition similar to effects seen in L2 processing. Lexical decisions of pseudowords based on plausibility, however, remain similar. While the pre-experiment language-mode task resulted in overall faster responses, there was no effect on processing patterns.

Findings/conclusions: L1 morphological processing is affected by continued exposure to a dominant second language with sensitivity to the internal structure or differences of morphologically complex items decreasing. The attrition group shows certain similarities to L2 morphological processing. Our findings also call for caution in the recruitment of L2-immersed experiment participants. Originality: Research on morphological processing in language attrition is scarce and no previous work has examined complex derived words. The addition of a principled manipulation of the preexperiment task is also uncommon.

Significance/implications: The possible similarity of L1-attrition and L2-learner processing challenges the concept of ‘native’ processing and the notion of ‘nativeness’ as a stable property. Further comparison of these populations may lead to a more thorough understanding of the adaptability of our processing system.

In the present study, we examine the interactive effect of vowels on Mandarin fricative sibilants using a passive oddball paradigm to determine whether the HEIGHT  features of vowels can spread on the surface and influence preceding consonants with unspecified features. The stimuli are two pairs of Mandarin words ([sa]   [ù a] and [su]   [ù u]) contrasting in vowel HEIGHT  ([LOW ] vs. [HIGH ]). Each word in the same pair was presented both as standard and deviant, resulting in four conditions (/standard/TdeviantU : /sa/T aU   /ù a/TsaU  and /su/T uU   /ù u/TsuU ). In line with the Featurally Underspecified Lexicon (FUL) model, asymmetric patterns of processing were found in the [su]   [ù u] word pair where both the MMN (mismatch negativity) and LDN (late discriminative negativity) components were more negative in /su/T uU  (mismatch) than in /ù u/TsuU  (no mismatch), suggesting the spreading of the feature [HIGH ] from the vowel [u] to [ù ] on the surface. In the [sa]   [ù a] pair, however, symmetric negativities (for both MMN and LDN) were observed as there is no conflict between the surface feature [LOW ] from [a] to [ù ] and the underlying specified feature [LOW ] of [s]. These results confirm that not all features are fully specified in the mental lexicon: features of vowels can spread on the surface and influence surrounding unspecified segments.

In normal language processing, we are continuously analyzing the form and structure of incoming speech signals in order to understand their meaning. At the same time, we unavoidably encounter situations in which words are contained within other words (e.g. ham  in hammer ). Since morphologically-related words often have a certain amount of phonological overlap, it is essential to understand the relevance of this overlap while investigating morphological processing. The current study provides a psycholinguistic investigation of the processing consequences of Bengali words overlapping in form both with and without being morphologically related. Overall, form-related items elicited significantly less priming than morphologically related items. Form-related items differing in length by a single segment did not prime one another, while morphologically-related items did. However, form-related items matched in length but differing in a single segment did prime, indicating that relationships between formrelated words are not always straightforward.

This paper examines the processing of height and place contrasts in vowels in words and pseudowords, using mismatch negativity (MMN) to determine firstly whether asymmetries resulting from underlying representations found in the processing of vowels in isolation will remain in a word context and secondly whether there is any difference in the way these phonological differences manifest in pseudowords. The stimuli are two sets of English ablaut verbs and corresponding pseudowords (sit ~ sat/*sif ~ *saf and get ~ got/*gef ~ *gof) contrasting in vowel height ([high] vs. [low]) and place of articulation ([coronal] vs. [dorsal]). In line with previous research, the results show a processing asymmetry for place of articulation in both words and nonwords, while different vowel heights result in symmetrical MMN patterns. These findings confirm that an underspecification account provides the best explanation for featural processing and that phonological information is independent of lexical status.

Six cross-modal lexical decision tasks with priming probed listeners’ processing of the geminate–singleton contrast in Bengali, where duration alone leads to phonemic contrast ([pata] ‘leaf’ vs. [pat:a] ‘whereabouts’), in order to investigate the phonological representation of consonantal duration in the lexicon. Four form-priming experiments (auditory fragment primes and visual targets) were designed to investigate listeners’ sensitivity to segments of conflicting duration. Each prime derived from a real word ([kʰɔm]/[gʰenː]) was matched with a mispronunciation of the opposite duration (*[kʰɔmː]/*[gʰen]) and both were used to prime the full words [kʰɔma] (‘forgiveness’) and [gʰenːa] (‘disgust’) respectively. Although all fragments led to priming, the results showed an asymmetric pattern. The fragments of words with singletons mispronounced as geminates led to equal priming, while those with geminates mispronounced as singletons showed a difference. The priming effect of the real-word geminate fragment was significantly greater than that of its corresponding nonword singleton fragment. In two subsequent semantic priming tasks with full-word primes a stronger asymmetry was found: nonword geminates (*[kʰɔmːa]) primed semantically related words ([marjona] ‘forgiveness’) but singleton nonword primes (*[gʰena]) did not show priming. This overall asymmetry in the tolerance of geminate nonwords in place of singleton words is attributed to a representational mismatch and points towards a moraic representation of duration. While geminates require a mora which cannot be derived from singleton input, the additional information in geminate nonwords does not create a similar mismatch.

Duration is used contrastively in many languages to distinguish word meaning (e.g. in Bengali, [pata] ‘leaf’ vs. [pat:a] ‘whereabouts’). While there is a large body of research on other contrasts in speech perception (e.g. vowel contrasts and consonantal place features), little work has been done on how durational information is used in speech processing. In non-linguistic studies of low-level processing, such as visual and non-linguistic acoustic pop-out tasks, an asymmetry is found where additional information is more readily detected than missing information. In this study, event-related potentials were recorded during two cross-modal auditory-visual semantic priming studies, where nonword mispronunciations of spoken prime words were created by changing the duration of a medial consonant (real word [dana] ‘seed’>nonword ⁎[dan:a]). N400 amplitudes showed an opposite asymmetric pattern of results, where increases in consonantal duration were tolerated and led to priming of the visual target, but decreases in consonantal duration were not accepted. This asymmetrical pattern of acceptability is attributed to the fact that a longer consonant includes all essential information for the recognition of the original word with a short medial consonant (a possible default category) and any additional information can be ignored. However, when a consonant is shortened, it lacks the required durational information to activate the word with the original long consonant.