Native speakers seamlessly marshal morphological resources to create new words, displaying striking consistency even where multiple options are available, as when a stem contains a phonological alternation. This is true even when these options appear to be idiosyncratically applied in existing words. For example, in derived words, the alternation…

This study adopted Ambridge's research paradigm to examine the effects of entrenchment, preemption, and verb semantics in second language (L2) acquisition of English "un-" prefixation. Three groups of Chinese learners of English (second- and fourth-year English majors and teachers of English) rated the acceptability of 48 "un-"…