The Mental Lexicon of L2 Learners of Russian: Phonology and Morphology in Lexical Storage and Access

Abstract

This review discusses a number of recent studies focusing on the role of phonological and morphological structure in lexical access of Russian words by nonnative speakers. This research suggests that late second language (L2) learners differ from native speakers of Russian in several ways: Lower-proficiency L2 learners rely on unfaithful, or fuzzy, phonological representations of words, which are caused either by problems with encoding difficult phonological contrasts, such as hard and soft consonants, or by uncertainty about the phonological form and form-meaning mappings for low-frequency words. In processing morphologically complex inflected words, L2 learners rely on decomposition to access the lexical meaning through the stem and may ignore the information carried by the inflection. The reviewed findings have broader implications for the understanding of nonnative word recognition, and the role of L2 proficiency in lexical processing.