Effect of Language Proficiency on Bilinguals’ Processing of Regular Past Tense Inflections in Second Language

Abstract

The study aimed at finding out how Pakistani non-native users process morphologically complex words in English. The study employed a masked priming experiment involving 39 (17 female and 22 male) Pakistani non-native users of English. The participants were divided into 3 groups (13 each according to their proficiency levels in English. The experiment contained items with the same primes and targets, items with completely unrelated primes and targets, and items with regular past tense inflections as primes and their uninflected forms as targets. The results show that full priming effects took place in case of the same primes and targets whereas no priming effect was witnessed in case of the unrelated primes and targets across all the items in all the three groups. Partial priming was observed in the items involving past tense inflections. However, the partial priming effect was limited only to the high proficiency group and the low and the medium proficiency groups did not show any priming effects. This confirms that L2 processing becomes more native-like as the users attain a higher level of proficiency in the second language which means that proficiency in L2 is the key factor in processing.