Masked morphological priming and sensitivity to the statistical structure of form-to-meaning mapping in L2

In this project, we investigated masked morphological priming in 80+ L1 Italian-L2 English speakers. We tracked the participants' L2 proficiency profile with a wide battery of tests on their lexical, morphological, phonological, spelling, and semantic abilities. We find that masked priming in L2 is critically modulated by proficiency; genuine morphological priming only arises as proficiency grows, while and orthographic priming (brothel-BROTH) shrinks as L2 competence increases. Age of acquisition was also evaluated, and did not affect the priming pattern. Furthermore, we showed that L2 priming is also modulated by sensitivity to graded, probabilistic relationships between form and meaning, as tracked by Orthography--to--Semantics Consistency (OSC). Overall, these data illustrate the trajectory towards a fully consolidated L2 lexicon, and show that masked priming is a key tracker of this process.

在本项目中，我们对80多位以意大利语为母语、英语为第二语言的L2英语使用者进行了掩码形态学启动效应的研究。我们通过一系列广泛的测试，追踪了参与者的第二语言熟练度轮廓，这些测试涵盖了他们的词汇、形态学、语音学、拼写和语义能力。研究发现，在第二语言中的掩码启动效应受到熟练度的关键调节；真正的形态学启动效应仅随着熟练度的提高而出现，而正字法启动效应（如 brothel-BROTH）则随着第二语言能力的增强而缩小。我们还评估了习得年龄，发现它并未影响启动模式。此外，我们还展示了第二语言启动效应也受到对形式与意义之间分级、概率关系的敏感性的调节，这种敏感性通过正字法到语义一致性（OSC）进行追踪。总体而言，这些数据描绘了向完全巩固的第二语言词汇库发展的轨迹，并表明掩码启动效应是这一过程的关键追踪指标。