Ko, I. Y. & Wang, M.
University of Maryland, College Park
The purpose of the present study is to investigate how Korean-English bilinguals process compound words. The research questions are: (1) Does morphological information play an independent role in cross-language activation of the constituent morphemes irrelevant to the phonological and semantic factors? (2) How are the effects of morphological, semantic, and phonological factors different across prime durations? and (3) How is the magnitude of the priming effect different between L1 (Korean)-L2 (English) direction (Experiment 1) and L2-L1 direction (Experiment 2)? Two masked priming experiments were conducted with adult Korean-English bilinguals. In both experiments, cross-language prime-target pairs (Korean-English for Experiment 1 and English-Korean for Experiment 2), co-varying morphological (±M), semantic (±S) and phonological (±P) relatedness were presented. In Experiment 1, 5 (prime condition: -M-S+P vs. +M+S+P vs. +M-S+P vs. +M-S-P vs. +M+S-P) X 2 (prime type: related vs. unrelated) x 3 (prime duration: 36 ms vs. 48 ms vs. 100 ms) design was employed. In Experiment 2, 3 (prime condition: -M-S+P vs. +M+S+P vs. +M+S-P) X 2 (prime type) X 3 (prime duration) design was employed. In Experiment 1, at 36 ms, preliminary results revealed priming effects in both +M+S+P and +M-S+P conditions, but no priming effect in +M+S-P and +M-S-P conditions. At 48 ms and 100 ms prime durations, the priming effect was significant only in +M+S+P condition. Therefore, morphological information plays an independent role in the early stage of cross-language activation irrelevant to the semantic factor. However, morphological decomposition is constrained by semantic transparency in the later stage of cross-language activation. Across all of the prime durations, phonological information is needed for morphological decomposition. In Experiment 2, there were no significant priming effects in all conditions across all of the prime durations. Therefore, there is a clear asymmetry in masked cross-language priming between L1-L2 and L2-L1 directions.