Morphological facilitation for regular and irregular verb formations in native and non-native speakers: Little evidence for two distinct mechanisms

The authors compared performance on two variants of the primed lexical decision task to investigate morphological processing in native and non-native speakers of English. They examined patterns of facilitation on present tense targets. Primes were regular ( billed–BILL) past tense formations and two types of irregular past tense forms that varied on preservation of target length ( fell–FALL; taught–TEACH). When a forward mask preceded the prime (Exp. 1), language and prime type interacted. Native speakers showed reliable REGULAR and IRREGULAR LENGTH PRESERVED facilitation relative to orthographic controls. Non-native speakers’ latencies after morphological and orthographic primes did not differ reliably except for regulars. Under cross-modal conditions (Exp. 2), language and prime type interacted. Native but not non-native speakers showed inhibition following orthographically similar primes. Collectively, reliable facilitation for regulars and patterns across verb type and task provided little support for a processing dichotomy (decomposition, non-combinatorial association) based on inflectional regularity in either native or non-native speakers of English.