English language and linguistics research seminar: Henrik Gyllstad, Lari-Valtteri Suhonen, Angelica Zordan: Exploring compound noun constituent meaning activation in L1 Swedish, Finnish, and Italian learners of L2 English – a masked priming study.

Project 2 in the TEAM research program funded by RJ focuses on the representation and processing of nominal compounds in three L2 English populations: L1 Swedish, L1 Italian, and L1 Finnish. 

Abstract

Learning a second or foreign language entails acquiring a large repository of words. A great extent of these will be complex words, consisting of multimorphemic structures. One type of complex word is compounds, formed by combining already existing lexemes into a new lexeme, as in the creation of bookshelf from book and shelf (Bauer, 2017). Research into the acquisition and processing of L1 compounds has been extensive (Libben et al., 2020). Much of this research has investigated whether compounds are decomposed into their constituents during processing, as well as what factors affect said decomposition. To date, research into these aspects in the domain of second/foreign language learning is rather scant in comparison (Archibald & Libben, 2019) (but see e.g., Li et al., 2017; Uygun & Gürel, 2017). The few studies that do exist have focused mainly on morphological decomposition in terms of form activation. 

The study presented in this talk is a contribution to this underexplored area of lexical research, investigating morphological decomposition in a L2 context. In particular, the study investigates meaning activation of compound constituents. A masked priming lexical decision task was used. In the experimental task, the 1^st and 2^nd constituents of English compounds of varying semantic transparency were primed by semantically related and unrelated words. The participants (N = 96) were adult L2 English learners from three typologically distinct L1 populations: Swedish, Finnish, and Italian, languages that vary in headedness, typological proximity to English, and compound orthographic spacing. The participants’ backgrounds were probed in a questionnaire, their English proficiency measured by a vocabulary test (LexTALE), and their familiarity with the target compounds was tested.

We will connect the study’s results to existing models and research into both L1 and L2 compound noun processing, with the aim of discussing form and meaning activation, as well as teasing out the roles of headedness, L2 proficiency, compound familiarity, and compound semantic transparency.