Spelling poses a challenge to Arabic-speaking learners due to the complexity of the morphological and orthographic systems in Arabic. Arabic morphology has been argued to play a critical role in spelling since its morphological operations are built on a system consisting of a root that is interlocking into different patterns of vowels to form…

Purpose: This study examined two markers of language impairment (LI) in a single experiment, testing sentence imitation and grammatical morphology production using an imitation task with masked morphemes. One goal was to test predictions of the morphological richness account of LI in Czech. We also tested the independent contributions of language…

Three experiments using a spelling error detection task investigated the extent to which morphemes and pseudomorphemes affect word processing. We compared the processing of transparent compound words (e.g., doorbell), pseudocompound words (e.g., carpet), and matched control words (e.g., tomato). In half of the compound and pseudocompound words,…

Generalization is the ability to apply regularities to novel instances, for example, correctly guessing that the plural for the novel English word 'wug' should be 'wugs'. Early language learners make overgeneralization errors like 'mouses', applying regularities beyond their attested uses. Theories concerned with the question of how learners learn…

Two masked priming experiments investigated the impact of prime lexicality (word vs. nonword) and the pseudo-morphological structure of prime stimuli (pseudosuffixed vs. nonsuffixed) on embedded word priming effects. In the related prime conditions, target words were embedded at the beginning of prime stimuli and were followed either by a…

The present study examined cross-linguistic differences in morphological processing in the visual and auditory modality. French and German adults performed a visual and auditory lexical decision task that involved the same translation-equivalent items. The focus of the study was on nonwords, which were constructed in a way that made it possible to…

On the evidence of four lexical-decision tasks in German, we examine speakers' sensitivity to internal morphological composition and abstract morphological rules during the processing of derived words, real and novel. In a lexical-decision task with delayed priming, speakers were presented with two-step derived nouns such as "Heilung…

This research was aimed at investigating L1 Thai learners' English word stress production in two aspects of English words -- 1) English words with different suffixes: suffixes affecting stress shift, i.e. '-ic' (e.g. 'fantástic'), '-ity' (e.g. 'idéntity') and '-tion / -sion' (e.g. 'eléction') and suffixes demanding stress, i.e. '-oon' (e.g.…

The morphological structure of the word has a central function in the organization of the mental lexicon and word recognition. Polymorphemic words in Arabic are composed of two non-concatenated morphemes: root and word-pattern. This study is the first to address the issue of nominal-pattern priming among young developing Arabic speakers. I…

The processing of morphological information during Chinese word memorization was investigated in the present study. Participants were asked to study words presented to them on a computer screen in the studying phase and then judge whether presented words were old or new in the test phase. In addition to parent words (i.e. the words studied in the…

This study examines the morphosyntactic development, specifically verb morphology, of typically-developing Bangla-speaking children between the ages of two and four. Three verb forms were studied: the Present Simple, the Present Progressive and the Past Progressive. The study was motivated by the observations that reliable language-specific…

There has been an increasing volume of evidence supporting the role of the syllable in word processing tasks. Recently it has also been shown that orthographic redundancy, related to the pattern of bigram frequencies, could not explain the syllable number effect on lexical decision times. This was demonstrated on a large sample of words taken from…

Which conditional verb forms proved most difficult for Thai secondary school students to produce, and what errors resulted in written and spoken English, were studied. Data was collected from two tasks: 1) a gap-fill task by 68 twelfth-grade students in an integrated English program at a public high school in Bangkok, Thailand and 2) a spoken task…

The purpose of this research was to understand better how morphemic units are encoded and auto-organised in memory and how they are accessed during writing. We hypothesised that the activation of morphemic units would not depend on rule-based learning during primary school but would be determined by frequency-based learning, which is a process…

We ask whether an adult learner's knowledge of their native language impedes statistical learning in a new language beyond just word segmentation (as previously shown). In particular, we examine the impact of native-language word-form phonotactics on learners' ability to segment words into their component morphemes and learn phonologically…