The role of inhibitory control in overcoming English written-verb inflection errors: Evidence from Chinese ESL learners

Abstract

This study examined the role of inhibitory control in overcoming English written errors related to the past tense marking of irregular verbs. The participants were Chinese English as a second language (ESL) learners, including 55 eighth-grade students and 30 undergraduate students who were asked to perform a sentence determination task (i.e., to determine whether a sentence presented on a screen is grammatically correct). The study used a negative priming paradigm. We found that the negative priming (NP) effect occurred in both the adolescent participants and the adult participants, and the magnitude of the NP effect was smaller in the adults than in the adolescents. These findings support the inhibitory control perspective—that learning verb inflections relies not only on the acquisition of declarative grammatical knowledge but also on the ability to inhibit an overgeneralized rule or an overlearned strategy. This study sheds light on the importance of inhibitory control in ESL learning and teaching.