Morphological decomposition in second language derivational processing

In order to detect the morphological decomposition in L2 processing of polymorphemic words, the present study has used one behavioral task-the masked priming to monitor the online L2 derivational processing. Experiment results showed great priming effects when the derived words were presented before their stems (e.g., speaker-speak), indicating the morphological decomposition in L2 processing. It was also discovered that, the decomposition takes place for all the derived words, regardless of participants´ familiarity with them. Based on these results, it was proposed that, the morphological decomposition is an automatic processing mechanism for polymorphemic words. As a universal mechanism, it can be used by both L1 and L2 speakers. Based on these findings, it is suggested that, the natural language processing and artificial language decoding research should stress the discovery and application of universal language patterns.