This paper contributes to the literature on the transferability of grapho-morphological awareness (GMA) for L2 learners by analyzing L2 learners' morphology knowledge at the word and text level. GMA helps readers to identify grammatical categories, infer meanings of unfamiliar words, and access stored lexical information (Koda, 2008). Previous research indicates that L2 GMA is influenced by L1 GMA (Fender 2003; Hancin-Bhatt & Nagy, 1994; Koda, 2000; Ramirez, et. al., 2010; Schiff & Calif, 2007).In this paper, native speakers of Spanish (n=30) and native speakers of English learning Spanish as an L2 (n=46) completed four tasks: two timed lexical decision tasks (LDT) in English (only English speakers) and Spanish; three short passages followed by multiple choice questions; a cloze task; and an interview to discuss their answers. L2 learners show a native-like word recognition pattern (Clahsen & Felser, 2006a, 2006b), providing evidence for a language-specific morphological processing. L2 learners could recognize and decompose words into morphemes and lexemes through the different tasks, which implies that they neither ignore morphology nor follow a whole-word reading approach. However, this ability did not always help them to access the right word meaning. Also, orthographically similar words from L1 and L2 interfere with word recognition of inflected and derived words. Despite showing interference in inflected words during the timed LDT, they show a greater control during the interviews. However, derivational morphology is more difficult for L2 learners since they do not know derivational constraints either implicitly or explicitly. The results suggest that intermediate L2 learners with an alphabetic writing system in their L1 can go beyond transfer in an alphabetic L2, and that the relationship between proficiency and GMA might be reciprocal (Kuo & Anderson, 2008).
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