Yuwen Zhou
Pronouns: She/Her/Hers
Research Mentor(s): Julie Boland
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Psychology / LSA
Program:
Authors: Yuwen Zhou, Julie Boland
Session: Session 3: 11:00 am – 11: 50 am
Poster: 34
Abstract
The current research is about derivational morphology, a process by which a new word is formed from an existing word. For example, the suffix “hood” can be attached to the stem word “neighbor” to form “neighborhood”. However, there is no such word as “schoolhood”. Past studies have shown that when the frequencies of use for the suffix and the stem are both high, it is more difficult for people to reject a nonword, even if the frequency of use for the whole word is 0. For example, it will be harder for people to reject “workist” because the frequencies of the stem “work” and the suffix “ist” are both very high. The current study concerns the second language acquisition of English words with derivational morphology. English-as-a-second-language (ESL) learners should learn about the meaning of stems and suffixes as well as which combinations of stems and suffixes form real words and which do not. We hypothesize that ESL learners will also be slower to reject the nonwords with higher stem and suffix frequencies. For the study, we recruited two groups of participants, one is ESL college students in China, and the other is native English speakers from the University of Michigan. Both groups were partitioned into three conditions: familiarity rating condition, word/nonword lexical decision condition 1, and word/nonword lexical decision condition 2. For the familiarity rating condition, we asked the participants to complete a Likert scale rating for each word. For the word/nonword lexical decision conditions, every participant’s accuracy and reaction time for each lexical decision were recorded.
