Graduation Semester and Year
Summer 2024
Language
English
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics
Department
Linguistics
First Advisor
Dr. Jeffrey Witzel
Second Advisor
Dr. Naoko Witzel
Third Advisor
Dr. Xiaomei Qiao
Abstract
This study investigates visual word recognition in the first language (L1) and second language (L2). Several studies in this area have reported L1/L2 processing differences at the lexical form level; however, the nature of these differences remains a matter of theoretical debate. The present study examines the extent to which these differences might relate to disparities in orthographic processing in the L1 and L2. Specifically, it uses masked identity priming to investigate whether skilled L2 readers differ from skilled L1 readers in terms of the efficiency with which they access abstract lexical representations during the early stages of visual word recognition. Previous studies have reported that skilled L1 readers show comparable masked identity priming effects for prime-target pairs that are visually similar (e.g., cook-COOK) and visually dissimilar (e.g., edge-EDGE). These form-independent identity priming effects have been interpreted to indicate that skilled L1 readers are largely unaffected by visual similarities/dissimilarities between uppercase and lowercase word forms during the early stages of visual word recognition. That is, skilled L1 readers appear to efficiently abstract away from low-level orthographic form characteristics when accessing lexical representations. This study investigates whether skilled L2 readers access abstract lexical representations from visual forms as efficiently as skilled L1 readers. The results largely replicated form-independent masked identity priming effect for skilled L1 readers (N=64). Moreover, although L2 readers exhibited a slightly larger priming effect for visually similar prime-target pairs, the overall pattern of results for this group was comparable to that of L1 readers. In addition, when L2 readers were divided into same-script bilinguals and different-script bilinguals based on their L1/L2 script properties, different-script bilinguals (N=54) exhibited comparable form-independent masked identity priming effects to that of L1 readers, whereas there was a larger difference in the priming effects under the similar and dissimilar conditions for the same-script bilinguals (N=16) than for both the skilled L1 readers and the different-script bilinguals. Taken together, these results indicate that although there might be slight difference between skilled L1 and L2 readers that seemed to be driven by same-script bilinguals, there appears to be no fundamental difference between skilled L1 and L2 readers in terms of the efficiency with which they use visual information -- and letter shapes in particular -- to access abstract lexical representations during the early stages of visual word recognition, especially when L2 readers are highly proficient and when they are processing low-level orthographic form information for relatively high-frequency words. Furthermore, this comparable processing efficiency for low-level orthographic characteristics suggests that observed L1/L2 lexical form processing disparities are likely not primarily attributable to persistent differences at this early (pre-lexical) stage of visual word recognition.
Keywords
orthographic processing efficiency, L2 lexical access, masked identity priming
Disciplines
Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Recommended Citation
Zhang, Xinwen, "Processing Visual Form Information during L1 and L2 Lexical Access" (2024). Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations. 99.
https://mavmatrix.uta.edu/linguistics_tesol_dissertations/99