The present study tests the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH), which claims that compared to L1 processing, L2 language processing generally underuses grammatical information, prioritizing nongrammatical information. Specifically, this cross-modal priming study tests SSH at the level of morphology, investigating whether late advanced L2 learners construct hierarchically structured representations for trimorphemic derived words during real-time processing as native speakers do. Our results support SSH. In lexical decision on English trimorphemic words (e.g., unkindness or [[un-[kind]]-ness]), L1 recognition of the targets was facilitated by their bimorphemic morphological-structural constituent primes (e.g., unkind), but not by their bimorphemic nonconstituent primes (e.g., kindness), which were only semantically and formally related to the target. In contrast, L2 recognition was equally facilitated by both constituent and nonconstituent primes. These results suggest that unlike L1 processing, L2 processing of multimorphemic words is not mainly guided by detailed morphological structure, overrelying on nonstructural information.

中文翻译：

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第二语言用户展示浅形态处理

本研究测试浅结构假设 (SSH)，该假设声称与 L1 处理相比，L2 语言处理通常未充分利用语法信息，优先考虑非语法信息。具体来说，这项跨模态启动研究在形态学水平上测试了 SSH，调查晚期高级 L2 学习者是否像母语人士一样在实时处理期间为三语素派生词构建层次结构的表示。我们的结果支持 SSH。在英语三态词的词汇决策中（例如，不友善s 或 [[un-[kind]]-ness]），L1 对目标的识别是由它们的双词素形态结构组成素数（例如，刻薄)，但不是通过它们的双态非组成素数（例如，善良)，它们仅在语义和形式上与目标相关。相比之下，组成素数和非组成素数同样促进了 L2 识别。这些结果表明，与 L1 处理不同，多态词的 L2 处理不是主要由详细的形态结构引导，而是过度依赖非结构信息。