Rule-Based Morphological Processing in a Second Language: A Behavioural Investigation

According to dual-system accounts of English past-tense processing, regular forms are decomposed into their stem and affix (played=play+ed) based on an implicit linguistic rule, whereas irregular forms (kept) are retrieved directly from the mental lexicon. In second language (L2) processing research, it has been suggested that L2 learners do not have rule-based decomposing abilities, so they process regular past-tense forms similarly to irregular ones (Silva & Clahsen 2008), without applying the morphological rule. The present study investigates morphological processing of regular and irregular verbs in Greek-English L2 learners and native English speakers. In a masked-priming experiment with regular and irregular prime-target verb pairs (playedplay/kept-keep), native speakers showed priming effects for regular pairs, compared to unrelated pairs, indicating decomposition; conversely, L2 learners showed inhibitory effects. At the same time, both groups revealed priming effects for irregular pairs. We discuss these findings in the light of available theories on L2 morphological processing

Masked Morphological Priming with Past-Tense Verbs in the L2: A Study with Japanese-English Bilinguals

博士学位論文の要旨及び審査結果の要旨 (Summary of Thesis(DR))othe

Masked Morphological Priming with Past-Tense Verbs in the L2: A Study with Japanese-English Bilinguals

Tohoku University博士（学術）博士学位論文 (Thesis(doctor))thesi

Irregular primes with respect to Genocchi numbers and Artin's primitive root conjecture

We introduce and study a variant of Kummer's notion of (ir)regularity of primes which we call G-irregularity and it is based on Genocchi numbers $G_n$, rather than Bernoulli number $B_n.$ We say that an odd prime $p$ is G-irregular if it divides at least one of the integers $G_2,G_4,\ldots, G_{p-3}$, and G-regular otherwise. We show that, as in Kummer's case, G-irregularity is related to the divisibility of some class number. Furthermore, we obtain some results on the distribution of G-irregular primes. In particular, we show that each primitive residue class contains infinitely many G-irregular primes and establish non-trivial lower bounds for their number up to a given bound $x$ as $x$ tends to infinity. As a by-product, we obtain some results on the distribution of primes in arithmetic progressions with a prescribed near-primitive root