Flexibility of Letter Position Coding and Morphological Processing in Chinese-English L2 Bilinguals: An Eye Tracking Study

Whether automatic morphological decomposition occurs during the processing of complex words remains a central debate in visual word recognition. Despite extensive research, findings supporting pre-lexical versus post-lexical accounts have been largely inconsistent. Furthermore, eye-tracking evidence, which can give insight into moment-by-moment morphological processing in L2 speakers during compound word reading, remains scarce. To address this gap, the present study investigated L2 morphological processing in Chinese-English bilinguals through an eye tracking experiment. We replicated the within-morpheme and between-morpheme conditions of Cong and Chen (2022) while introducing a comparison between derivatives and compound words.