Processing derivational Morphology by Persian EFL Learners

The importance of having a grasp of the way morphological structures are stored in the human mind and how they are retrieved during comprehension or production of language is an undisputable fact. As Chomsky have set forth in his Generative grammar, having a command of a finite set of rules leads to being able to generate indefinite number of new utterances and this idea can be generalized into knowing a limited set of morphological rules and being able to produce lots of new words without having to commit long lists of vocabulary to one’s memory. The question that arises here is that what goes on in the mind while one comprehends derivational morphology, whether the mind break the derived word into its morphological constituents or better to say decomposition takes place or the derived word is stored as a whole unit in mind. The current study is designed to probe about this topic and to figure out how English and Persian derivational suffixes are processed by Persian EFL learners. 60 Persian learners of English at two proficiency levels (advanced and intermediate) took part in this study. The effects of several variables, namely base and morpheme frequency and proficiency level were taken into account. Two separate priming tasks in Persian and English were conducted during the course of this study. 120 derived words (60 English and 60 Persian) were the target of the priming tasks and each word was primed by 3 types of priming words: identity (carefulcareful), related (carecareful) and control (desirecareful). Participants’ reaction times were measured using E-prime software and were fed into SPSS software for further analysis. The initial results indicated that the Persian learners of English processing of the derived words cannot be assigned strictly to decomposition or whole-word representations in the mind. What seems more plausible is to assume that highly frequent words (whether base or suffix frequency) are stored as whole words but lower base and morpheme frequency ones are decomposed. So a dual route model is confirmed (Pinker, 1991; Nivja, De Jong ,Schreuder&Baayen, 2000; Taft, 2004). Proficiency seems to play a role since in lower proficiency levels; more decomposition was detected while more proficient participants utilized more whole-word representation

کلیدواژه ها:

Morphological Word ، Derivational Affixes ، Processing ، Frequency. Dual-route Model