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Word frequency and morphological family size effects on the accuracy and speed of lexical access in school‐aged bilingual students
Author(s) -
Akbari Neda
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
international journal of applied linguistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.712
H-Index - 39
eISSN - 1473-4192
pISSN - 0802-6106
DOI - 10.1111/ijal.12113
Subject(s) - psychology , meaning (existential) , word (group theory) , linguistics , word lists by frequency , neuroscience of multilingualism , philosophy , sentence , psychotherapist , neuroscience
This study investigated whether school‐aged bilingual students demonstrate word frequency and morphological family size ( MFS ) effects for written L 2 words, and if so, the extent to which the effects are present for bilingual students in different grades. The study revealed both word frequency and MFS effects for the bilingual students in relation to the accuracy of their responses. The bilingual students were less accurate in response to mid and low‐frequency words and words with a very small morphological family compared to the monolingual students. Despite that, they demonstrated similar speed of access to the written L 2 words in different frequency ranges and with different MFS s. The findings were discussed in terms of the strength of connections between the form and meaning of words.