Cross-language influences on morphological processing in bilinguals

Several decades of reading research in bilinguals have revealed evidence for cross-language influences on the visual recognition of simple words (e.g., farm). However, comparatively little is known about cross-language transfer mechanisms involved when reading morphologically complex words (e.g., farmer or farmhouse). In this chapter, we provide a review of studies examining the processing of affixed and compound words in bilinguals, with a particular focus on studies directly targeting cross-language transfer. The key findings support the idea that bilinguals rapidly and simultaneously activate the morphological features in both of their languages during the early, automatic stages of visual word recognition. Implications for theoretical models of morphological processing in bilinguals and future directions are discussed.