In a long distance Lagrangian approach to the low lying meson phenomenology we present and discuss the most general spin zero multi-quark interaction vertices of non-derivative type which include a set of effective interactions proportional to the current quark masses, breaking explicitely the chiral SU(3)_L X SU(3)_R and U_A(1) symmetries. These vertices are of the sameorder in Nc counting as the 't Hooft flavor determinant interaction and the 8 quark interactions which extend the original leading in Nc four quark interaction Lagrangian of Nambu and Jona-Lasinio. The Nc assignements match the counting rules based on arguments set by the scale of spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking. With path integral bosonization techniques which take appropriately into account the quark mass differences we derive the mesonic Lagrangian up to 3-point mesonic vertices. We demonstrate that explicit symmetry breaking effects in interactions are essential to obtain the correct empirical ordering and magnitude of the splitting of certain states such as m_K < m_eta for the pseudoscalars and m{kappa(800)} < m{a0(980)} m{f0(980)} in the scalar sector, and achieve total agreement with the empirical low lying meson mass spectra. With all parameters of the model fixed by the spectra we analyze further a bulk of two body decays at tree level of the bosonic Lagrangian: the strong decays of the scalars sigma->pi pi, f0->pi pi, kappa->pi K, a0(980)->pi eta, as well as the two photon decays of a0, f0 and sigma mesons and the anomalous decays of the pseudoscalars {pi,eta,eta'}-> 2 photons. Our results for the strong decays are within the current expectations and the pseudoscalar radiative decays are in very good agreement with data. The radiative decays of the scalars are smaller than the observed values for the f0 and the sigma, but reasonable for the a0. A detailed discussion accompanies all the results.

18 pages, 2 figures, 8 tables