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The activation of grammaticalized meaning in L2 processing: Toward an explanation of the morphological congruency effect
Adult second language learners have been found to have great difficulty in learning inflectional morphemes that are not instantiated in their native languages. It is proposed that this difficulty is a result of L2 learners not being able to automatically activate the meaning expressed by the morpheme because of the design of their native language. Three sentence-picture matching experiments were done to test if the plural meaning was automatically activated in sentence processing by Chinese and Russian ESL speakers. The critical stimuli included sentences that were congruent or incongruent in number with the pictures (e.g., singular word book with multiple books). Consistent with the predictions of the proposal, Russian ESL speakers, like native English speakers, produced a number-mismatch effect, responding more slowly to sentence-picture pairs that were not matched in number Chinese ESL speakers showed no such effect.