Investigating Morphological Decomposition of Established and Novel Compound Nouns in L1 English Speakers and Norwegian L2 English Speakers - A masked Lexical Decision Task study
Eirik Hugaas Ofstad · NORA - Norwegian Open Research Archives · 2019
Abstract Through a masked Lexical Decision Task experiment, the current thesis finds evidence for a sublexical morphological decomposition of established orthographically contiguous compound nouns (such as |toothbrush|) in Norwegian L2 English speakers, but not in native English speakers. Furthermore, this difference between the subject groups is not present with novel orthographically contiguous compound nouns (such as|groundlord|), where both subject groups showed sublexical morphological decomposition. The data indicates that Norwegian L2 English speakers morphologically decompose as their first mechanism - while native English speakers employ a whole word look-up as their first mechanism in visual word recognition and lexical access of compound nouns. It is suggested this distinction is rooted in the differing productive and orthographic norms Norwegian and English portray in compound nouns, and that Norwegian L2 English speakers carry over their L1 decompositional behaviors to their L2 processing.