Masked Priming in Derivational and Inflectional Morphology: A

For some time now, there has been much debate on the mechanisms by which morphologically complex words are processed. The Dual Mechanism Model (Pinker, 1999), posits that there is a dissociation between rule-based forms which are decomposed, such as regular inflections, and associative forms which are stored fully in the lexicon, such as irregular inflections. This model has been based on various studies in L1 showing dissociation between regular and productive processes on the one hand and irregular and unproductive processes on the other. In light of this, Stanners et al. (1979) found that the reaction time to a target word can be facilitated by the presentation of a prime word earlier and specifically that in inflections, regular forms produce full priming while irregulars do not. Furthermore, in terms of derivation, Clahsen (2004) found that morphologically complex adjectives in German with the productive prefix (un-) showed a full priming effect, while only a partial priming effect was found for the unproductive prefix (in-). Although the Dual Mechanism model can account for much of the extant empirical evidence in L1, it remains to be shown whether it can also account for L2 behaviour. Ullman (2001) proposes an additional aspect in that there are two different memory systems such that th