Morphological processing in L2 Italian: Evidence from a masked priming study

The present paper explores the processing of morphologically complex words in L2 Italian by means of an experimental psycholinguistic technique, i.e. a masked priming experiment associated with a lexical decision task. More specifically, we manipulated desadjectival nominalizations in –ità (e.g. velocità < veloce) and in -ezza (e.g. bellezza < bello), that differ in terms of numerosity, productivity (Rainer 2004) and on surface frequency (according to the COLFIS database). Morphological priming effects were evaluated relative to both orthographic and identity conditions and the data revealed significant morphological priming effects emerging for words ending with the most productive suffix (–ità) and having a high surface frequency in Italian. Our data on derivation suggest that similarly to native speakers, L2 learners are sensitive to morphological information, but they integrate it progressively through L2 learning process.