Reaction times to morphologically inflected nonwords: a study of second language learners of English

Previous studies have shown that monolingual speakers of English are sen- sitive to the presence of inflectional morphology when it is applied to non- words. For example, when a nonword ends in a sequence of phonemes that respect the morphophonological rules regulating tense inflection, speakers are slower in recognizing it. In this study, we investigated whether a similar pattern applies to second-language learners as well. 91 learners of English with Czech as L1 were presented with a same/different minimal pairs task containing nonwords with various endings (in one condition, a sequence of phonemes that could be interpreted as an inflectional morpheme). Consistently with research on monolingual participants, the study showed that second-language learners are also slower in processing nonwords that contain potential inflectional morphemes. The pattern was observed from low levels of proficiency, suggesting that learners are sensitive to these rules from early stages of learning.