Investigating the role of cross-linguistic influences in non-native morphological processing

Abstract We tested masked morphological priming effects with prefixed and suffixed words in L2 speakers of German with L1 Turkish, a language in which prefixes are virtually absent. We found weaker prefixation than suffixation priming, suggesting that cross-linguistic morphological differences between speakers’ L1 and L2 may influence L2 morphological processing. We additionally compared our findings to those of a previous study involving L1 Russian-L2 German speakers and L1 German speakers (Ciaccio & Clahsen (2020). Variability and consistency in first and second language processing: A masked morphological priming study on prefixation and suffixation. Language Learning, 70 (1), 103–136). The magnitude of prefixation versus suffixation priming of our group was significantly larger than that reported for the L1 Russian-L2 German group, further corroborating the cross-linguistic hypothesis. However, we found no significant difference between our group and L1 German speakers. Therefore, we additionally consider the hypothesis of a general processing disadvantage for prefixed words as an alternative explanation. We conclude that several factors may contribute to why prefixation, in some studies, proves to be more challenging than suffixation, cross-linguistic influences being possibly just one of them.