Towards a constructional approach of L2 morphological processing

Following Silva & Clahsen seminal work, psycholinguistic research on L2 morphological processing has mainly adopted a morpheme-based, decompositional dual route approach suggesting that L2 learners have a limited access to morphological representation during processing and consequently rely more on lexical storage (Clahsen H, Felser C, Neubauer K, Sato M, Silva R, Lang Learn 60:21–43, 2010; Clahsen and Felser, 2017). Therefore, experimental research, which largely used the masked priming paradigm, mainly focused on the distinction between storage and computation as two alternative, mutually exclusive and competing mechanisms. In this paper, we claim that a word-based approach, which considers morphology in terms of constructional schemas, allows us to overcome the rule vs. list fallacy and therefore reshapes the dichotomy between L1 and L2 processing mechanisms. Although a consistent proposal is still out of reach, given that data on L2 processing are limited, we will discuss the advantages of a model which jointly considers formal and semantic similarities, as well as paradigmatic proprieties.