Transposed-Letter Priming Effect Across Morpheme Boundaries In Second Language Learning

Transposed letter effect across morpheme boundaries refers to an interesting language phenomenon that the letter transposition across morpheme boundaries makes no impact on the words recognition in language processing.Transposed Letter priming Effect(TL priming effect)across morpheme boundaries indicates that the non-words formed by letter transposition across morpheme boundary are more facilitated to activate the base words than those non-words with letter substitution.So far,it has become the studying focus of so many scholars.Previous researches mainly discussed the existence of TL priming effect across morpheme boundaries in certain specific language,the influence of words length,words frequency,morpheme frequency,semantic transparency and morphological types.In addition,previous studies on TL priming effect across morpheme boundaries usually were linked to the exploration of the mental representation of complex words.Therefore,models on different sites were proposed based on a large number of researches,mainly standing in two opposite positions.One position argues that morphological decomposition takes place earlier than the semantic access.For an instance,pre-lexical decomposition models(Taft,1979;Rastle et al.,2004)posit that morpheme decomposition takes place more early than the mental lexicon access in the processing of written words.The other position indicates that whole word representation arises before words decomposition.For example,Whole-word accounts(Lukatela,Gligorijevic,Kostic,& Turvey,1980;Feldman & Fowler,1987)hold that morphological effects arise relatively late in the recognition process and there exists no morphological decomposition.Consequently,all these models propose different views about the existence and order of morpheme decomposition,yielding at no consistent explanation.Although there were some investigations about the processing of different morphological complex words,mainly the inflectional words and derivational words,the compound words got little attention.Additionally,previous researches focused on the difference between native speakers and second language learners in the processing of complex words.Among these researches,the results of second language learners stood two contradictory sites because little of them took the language proficiency into consideration.Thus,it was worthwhile to further investigate on the processing of different morphological complex words for different second language proficiency learners.Out of these research purposes,this study proposed the following questions:(1)What is the influence of morphological types in the transposed letter priming effect?(2)How does the language proficiency affect the transposed letter priming effect across different morpheme boundaries in second language learning?(3)What is the difference between the high language proficiency and low language proficiency learners in the processing of complex words?In this research,the empirical software,E-prime 2.0,was adopted to test subjects' linguistic response.40 native Hunan university students with English as second language were chosen as the experiment subjects.According to their language proficiency,they were divided into two groups,including low proficiency group and high proficiency group,20 students in each.The data analysis was done under the assistance of SPSS software.The results were presented in the following aspects:(1)Morphological types cast an impact on the TL priming effect,but not on the TL priming effect across morpheme boundaries.(2)Language proficiency indicates a more salient influence in the TL priming effect across morpheme boundaries than the TL priming effect within morpheme boundaries.(3)The high language proficiency students usually chose the whole-word route,whereas the low language proficiency subjects adopted the decomposition route.The conduct of this research was significant owing to the following reasons.Firstly,it expanded the studying range of TL priming effect across morpheme boundaries.Through conducting empirical studies on different kinds of morphemes,it indicated the influence of morphological types made on TL priming effect across morpheme boundaries.Thirdly,with the exploration and discussion of the experiment results,this research inferred and summarized the processing rules of complex words for second language learners.In this way,we sketched a clearer picture of the words recognition in second language learning.Thus,it played a significant role in the teaching and learning process of words with different morphemes.Finally,it took second language proficiency into consideration,demonstrated the crucial impact of language proficiency and explained the inconsistent findings of previous researches.Therefore,it provided scientific teaching guidance to teachers for different language proficiency students.