Morphology, frequency, and the processing of derived words in native and non-native speakers

This study reports results from psycholinguistic experiments (visual lexical decision, masked priming) examining the processing of derived German nouns with the nominalizing suffix –ung in adult native (L1) speakers of German and adult second language (L2) learners of German with Polish as L1. The pairings of experimental effects obtained for the two participant groups were different. Whilst the L1 group exhibited a response time advantage for high-frequency forms in unprimed lexical decision plus facilitated recognition of morphologically related items in masked priming, the L2 group demonstrated an even stronger surface-frequency effect than the L1 group in unprimed lexical decision, but no effect of morphological facilitation in the priming experiment. We will discuss the implications of these findings for understanding L1/L2 processing differences and, more generally, with respect to the significance of frequency effects for models of language representation and processing.