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African languages have rarely been the subject of psycholinguistic experimentation. The current study employs a masked visual priming experiment to investigate morphological processing in a Bantu language, Setswana. Our study takes advantage of the rich system of prefixes in Bantu languages, which offers the opportunity of testing morphological priming effects from prefixed inflected words and directly comparing them to priming effects from prefixed derived words on the same targets. We found significant priming effects of similar magnitude for both prefixed inflected and derived word forms, which were clearly dissociable from prime-target relatedness in both meaning and (orthographic) form. These findings provide support for a (possibly universal) mechanism of morphological decomposition applied during early visual word recognition that segments both (prefixed) inflected and derived word forms into their morphological constituents.
Is there an ideal time window for language acquisition after which nativelike
representation and processing are unattainable? Although this question has
been heavily debated, no consensus has been reached. Here, we present
evidence for a sensitive period in language development and show that it is
specific to grammar. We conducted a masked priming task with a group of
Turkish-German bilinguals and examined age of acquisition (AoA) effects on
the processing of complex words. We compared a subtle but meaningful
linguistic contrast, that between grammatical inflection and lexical-based
derivation. The results showed a highly selective AoA effect on inflectional
(but not derivational) priming. In addition, the effect displayed a discontinuity
indicative of a sensitive period: Priming from inflected forms was nativelike
when acquisition started before the age of 5 but declined with increasing
AoA. We conclude that the acquisition of morphological rules expressing
morphosyntactic properties is constrained by maturational factors.