Cross-linguistic influence on morphology in the bilingual mental lexicon

This article addresses the question if and, if so, how the acquisition and use of morphology in the second language is affected by L1 morphology. This issue is discussed in relation to a recent interdisciplinary model of the bilingual mental lexicon (Lowie 1998), in which affixes may have independent representations, conditioned by transparency, productivity and frequency. L1 influence, operationalised as the amount of semantic overlap between an L1 affix and an L2 affix and developmental factors (the productivity of L2 affixes) were included in an experiment involving Dutch learners of English. The results show a strong effect of cross-linguistic influence at all levels of proficiency and an effect of productivity only at the highest level of proficiency.