This paper aims to explore how Korean-Chinese bilingual speakers process Korean final ending -ko. Korean-Chinese bilingual speakers from Yanbian participated in the masked priming experiments through a word judgment task. The masked priming experiments were designed to compare the subjects’ response under three different prime-target conditions: Identical Condition, Unrelated Condition, and Test Condition. The participants’ response time in the experiments was statistically analyzed in two different ways: i.e., subject (F1) analyses and item (F2) analyses. The results of both the subject analyses and the item analyses revealed full priming effects, as is usually found in native speakers’ morphological processing. These findings indicate that Chinese-Korean bilingual speakers are sensitive to each combining morpheme of morphologically complex words including Korean final ending -ko and their processing of the words are not dependent upon the lexical storage of the full form.

This paper reports results from two types of priming experiments (i.e., masked and cross-modal priming experiments) which compare Chinese L2 learners’ morphological processing of a Korean verbal suffix -ko with adult native speakers of Korean. L1/L2 differences were found in both the masked and cross-modal priming experiments: Full priming effects were found in the masked priming experiment and partial priming effects in the cross-modal priming experiment in L1, while weak or no priming effects were found in both types of priming experiments of L2. These findings indicate that L2 learners of Korean are less sensitive to morphological structure than native speakers and dependent on the lexical storage of the full form. This study also provided evidence for the non-difference between the masked priming and the cross-modal priming experiments both in L1 and L2.