Number/Person Errors in an Information-Processing Perspective: Implications for Form-Focused Instruction

Abstract

Errors in inflectional morphology have usually been called local on the assumption that they do not interfere with comprehension. Such errors have been considered to be the cause of negative emotional reactions rather than comprehension problems. However, the ESL data presented in this paper show that the grammatical categories of number and person can play an important role in establishing cognitive continuity of textual occurrences (i. e., can have discourse-cohesive functions). In such cases, the number/person errors are not local but global, as they do affect text comprehension. Such global problems point to the cognitive salience of the number/person inflections in some contexts. Because incomplete acquisition of these inflections can be attributed to their being not salient enough on most occasions to capture the selective attention of adult learners, it is likely that we can facilitate their learning by increasing their occurrence in language input contexts that raise their cognitive salience. Doing this will ensure that the feature is noticed and processed for meaning more often, thereby made easier to learn.