Word forms such as "walked" or "walker" are decomposed into their morphological constituents (walk + -ed/-er) during language comprehension. Yet, the efficiency of morphological decomposition seems to vary for different languages and morphological types, as well as for first and second language speakers. The current study…

This article introduces the NFL7 (Nuclear Family List 7), a list of the 2,887 most frequent "nuclear" word families, that is, families that include just the most frequent family members and exclude those that constitute less than 7% of family occurrences. The NFL7 was developed by using a dedicated computer program, the Nuclear List…

This study examined the sensitivity of Chinese-English bilinguals to derivational word structure in English. In the first experiment, English monolinguals showed masked priming effects for prime-target pairs related both transparently (e.g., "hunter-HUNT") and opaquely (e.g., "corner-CORN") but not for those related purely in…

The present study analyzes morphological productivity for complex verbs in second language acquisition by analyzing a corpus of German as a Foreign Language (GFL). It shows that advanced learners of GFL use prefix and particle verbs relatively frequently and productively but less so than native speakers do and discusses these findings in the light…

Although cross-linguistic research on second language tense-aspect acquisition has uncovered universal tendencies concerning the association between verbal semantics and tense-aspect markers, it is still unclear what mechanisms underlie this link. This study investigates the acquisition of two imperfective aspect markers ("-ko iss-" and…

This study investigates the development of plural adjective agreement in Hebrew, focusing on the consolidation of Hebrew number/gender morphology in children and adolescents across the school years in comparison with adults. A total of 240 Hebrew-speaking participants in seven consecutive grade levels (kindergarten to sixth grade) plus a group of…

The aim of this study was to use crosslinguistic data from French-English bilinguals to test two models of past tense acquisition: (a) single route (all past tense forms rely on morphophonological schemas) and (b) dual route (irregular forms are learned as words, regulars through rules). These models make similar predictions about English…

The study examined the acquisition of two morphological procedures of noun pluralization in Palestinian Arabic: "Sound Feminine Plural" (SFP) and "Broken Plural" (BP). We tested if noun pluralization was affected by (1) the type of morphological procedure, (2) the degree of familiarity with the singular noun stem, and (3) the…

The present study examined the proposal that the presence of a similar morpheme in the learner's first and second languages (L2) facilitates morphological development in the L2. Advanced Russian and Japanese speakers of English as a second language performed a self-paced reading task in which they read English sentences word by word for…

Learning inflectional morphology is a vexing problem for second language (L2) learners. Children acquiring their native language also experience some difficulty, which results in their committing overgeneralization errors. Long after individuals have achieved a high level of proficiency in the L2, they are still plagued by uncertainty when it…

This study examines the storage versus composition of Spanish inflected verbal forms in first language (L1) and second language (L2) speakers of Spanish. L2 participants were selected to have mid-to-advanced proficiency, high classroom experience, and low immersion experience, typical of medium-to-advanced foreign language learners. Participants…

Metalinguistic skills may develop differently in multilingual and monolingual children. This study investigated effects of immersion in Cherokee as a second language on young children's (4;5-6;1) skills of noticing morphological forms/patterns in English, their first language, by comparing English past tense skills on two nonword and two real-word…

This study examines how topic familiarity and working memory capacity affect beginning Spanish learners' reading comprehension and their processing of future tense morphology. Participants included 94 adult learners from an accelerated, beginning Spanish course. In addition to completing a computerized version of a reading span test as a measure…

According to the aspect hypothesis (Andersen & Shirai, 1996; Bardovi-Harlig, 2000), perfective morphology emerges before imperfective morphology, it is first used in telic predicates (achievements and accomplishments) and it later extends to atelic predicates (activities and states). The opposite development is hypothesized for imperfective…

The study sought to examine the effect of lexical aspect and narrative discourse structure on the pattern of acquisition and use of English verbal morphology exhibited by creole-speaking students. Findings indicated that the emergent pattern of morphology in the creole participants' written interlanguage appeared to be influenced not only by…