Testing the stem dominance hypothesis: meaning analysis of inflected words and prepositional phrases.

We tested the hypothesis that lexical-semantic access of inflected words is governed by the word stem. Object drawings overlaid with a dot/arrow marking position/movement were matched with corresponding linguistic expressions like "from the house". To test whether the stem dominates lexical-semantic access irrespective of its position, we used Swedish prepositional phrases (locative information via preposition immediately preceding the stem) or Finnish case-inflected words (locative information via suffix immediately following the stem).

L1 effects on the processing of inflected nouns in L2.

This study investigated the effect of L1 on the recognition of L2 Swedish inflected nouns. Two groups of late L2 learners with typologically very different native languages, Hungarian (agglutinative) and Chinese (isolating), participated in a visual lexical decision experiment. The target words were matched inflected vs.