AFFIXATION EFFECTS IN A VISUAL SEARCH TASK : A CROSS-LINGUISTIC STUDY

Abstract

A spatial prelexical address model, adapted from Caramazza and Hillis (1990), is proposed to account for the prelexical interactions between spatial bottom-up and top- down processes necessary for lexical access. English L1 / Mandarin L2 (N = 40) and English L 1 I Malay L2 (N = 40) participants were administered a visual search task incorporating the Simon effect in order to test whether spatial top-down processes occur at the prelexical level. Experiment 1 looked at the effect of L2 background on visual search. Findings in Experiment 1 showed that different kinds of script exposure result in different search functions for English prefixed words, but same functions for prefixed nonwords. Experiment 2 looked at the effect of language orthography on visual search. In Experiment 2, Malay L2 participants showed language orthography differences suggesting morphological parsing for Malay prefixed stimuli, but not for English. In sum, findings indicate top-down whole-word processing for English prefixed words, and top-down morpheme-based processing for Malay prefixed words.