著者

森田 光宏

出版者

全国英語教育学会

雑誌

ARELE : annual review of English language education in Japan (ISSN:13448560)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.21, pp.1-10, 2010-03

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The purpose of the present study is to investigate how Japanese learners of English store and process derived words in their mental lexicon. L1 research in word recognition has given rise to three hypotheses. The affix stripping hypothesis claims that derived words are accessed by their component morphemes, while the full listing hypothesis claims that they are accessed as full forms. Hybrid hypotheses such as the Meta Model claim that the lexical properties of suffixes determine how derived words are processed. Our data show that Japanese learners of English with larger vocabulary sizes tend to decompose highly productive, semantically and phonologically transparent Level 2 suffixes, but not less productive, semantically and phonologically opaque Level 1 suffixes. On the other hand, the learners with smaller vocabulary sizes tend to process both kinds of suffixes by the Decompose Route. It is argued that the learners may have not acquired the meanings and phonology of the derived words with the less semantically and phonologically transparent suffixes. These results support hybrid hypotheses, even for L2 learners.