Second Language Acquisition and Processing of Functional Morphology

This book is an attempt to locate the source of the difficulties experienced by adult second language (L2) learners of English in the production of past tense and verbal agreement morphology, observed as an alternation between the inflected and stem forms of verbs in contexts where only the former is accepted in target grammars. To this end, current competing syntactic, non-syntactic and phonological accounts of the phenomenon are tested against production, perception and processing data. Production was tested by a sentence elicited imitation task, which comprised of 50 aural sentences creating obligatory contexts for the properties under study. Participants were asked to repeat the sentences one by one and their responses were recorded. Perception and processing were tested by a computerised picture-choice task, which consisted of 88 picture-sentence trials. Participants were asked to choose one picture, the choice of which depended on their perception of verbal morphology. Picture choice response, reaction times and eye movements were recorded in this task. The data obtained from these tasks provide important insights about the acquisition and processing of L2 morphology.