L2 processing of morphologically complex words in Chinese

This study investigated the L2 morphological processing by examining whether L2 Chinese speakers are able to construct hierarchically structured representations of morphologically complex words as efficiently as L1 Chinese speakers. Additionally, the current study explored whether the prominence of
Chinese morphemes influences L2 speakers’ engagement in native-like structural processing of complex words. To tap into the morphological decomposition in the early stage of lexical processing, a masked-priming lexical decision task was employed. The findings of this study align with the Shallow Structure Hypothesis, which proposes that non-structural information
takes priority over structural information in L2 processing. L2 speakers exhibited similar priming patterns to L1 speakers for morphologically related prime-target pairs, but the L2 participants also showed semantic and orthographic priming effects which were not found in the L1 group. This indicates that L2 speakers heavily rely on semantic and orthographic cues, leading to enhanced priming effects for morphologically related prime-target pairs that share the initial two characters. These findings suggest that L2 processing of morphologically complex words may prioritize non-structural information by relying more on lexical-semantic connections and surface-level orthographic information rather than deep hierarchical structure processing.