Acquisition Of Past Tense Research Articles

Assessing the Impact of Written Corrective Feedback Strategies on the Writing Proficiency of Senior High School Students

Written corrective feedback (WCF) in enhancing writing proficiency has been the subject of numerous studies, but few studies have examined students' perceptions about the value of feedback on their written errors. This study aims to investigate the effects of direct WCF, indirect WCF, and metalinguistic explanation on the past simple tense acquisition of senior high school learners in Pakistan. Much research has been conducted involving adults, while little has been done to consider senior high school students in this regard. This study has been aimed to explore the effects of direct WCF, indirect WCF and metalinguistic explanation on the writing performance of senior high school students in Pakistan. Students were divided into four groups, each with one type of feedback, including group four as the control group with no feedback. All four groups had written narration on a given picture and were treated by mentioned feedback. After that, results were compared to look for effective feedback type. After writing task, a survey and interview were conducted to explore students’ perceptions about WCF and WCF strategies. The study found that learners want feedback from their teachers and prefer direct feedback and Metalinguistic explanation. This research has been planned to help learners in their early stage through WCF learn a second language and form a strong linguistic base that will help them construct grammatically correct sentences and compositions.

Written corrective feedback, learner-internal cognitive processes, and the acquisition of regular past tense by Chinese L2 learners of English

Abstract This article reports on a mixed methods study that investigated the extent to which written corrective feedback (WCF) contributes to L2 learners’ acquisition of regular past tense in English and the cognitive processes that underpin the corrective feedback provided. The study adopted a pretest-posttest-delayed posttest design and involved 113 intermediate-level Chinese learners of English who were assigned to four conditions: indirect WCF, direct WCF, metalinguistic WCF, and control. A picture description task and a grammaticality judgement test were used to measure gains in the target structure. To explore how learners process feedback, nine learners, three from each treatment group, were selected to produce think aloud protocols. The study found that all three types of WCF had a positive effect on the picture description task, though none of them had a clear impact on the grammaticality judgement test. In addition, indirect WCF was found to have an advantage over direct and metalinguistic WCF on the delayed posttest, when compared to the control group. Think aloud data suggested that indirect WCF induced deeper cognitive processes than the other two kinds of feedback, which may account for the superiority of indirect WCF.

함축 척도를 활용한 한국어 과거 시제 ‘-었-’의 습득 연구

This study was designed to research the developmental patterns of the past tense ‘-eott-’ produced by the L1 Chinese learners of Korean. For the purpose of this study, the participants were asked to produce a free writing assignment on the same topic, and different from previous studies, the assignments were analyzed using the Accuracy Method as well as the Implicational Scaling Method. The results of studies using the Accuracy Method are achievement verbs, accomplishment verbs, psycho-cognitive verbs, activity verbs, and stative verbs. This is different from the outcome of the Implicational Scaling Method, which are accomplishment verbs, achievement verbs, activity verbs, psycho-cognitive verbs, and static verbs. The results of the two methods differed, and this difference illustrates that in the study of past tense acquisition, using only the Accuracy Method is insufficient. However, both results are consistent with the current predictions that the past tense morphemes are generally acquired first on [+telic] semantic verbs. (Yonsei University)

Effects of Recasts, Metalinguistic Feedback, and Students’ Proficiency on the Acquisition of Greek Perfective Past Tense

The role of interactional corrective feedback in second language assessment has attracted both teachers’ and second language researchers’ interest, as they are concerned with when corrective feedback can be implemented to assist second language acquisition. This quasi-experimental intervention study aims to investigate the impact of two corrective feedback types, namely recasts and metalinguistic feedback, and students’ proficiency in the acquisition of the Greek perfective past tense. The sample consists of ten adult beginners’ classes (n = 86 students) of the Modern Greek Language Teaching Center of the University of Athens. The classes were randomly assigned to three treatment conditions: (a) recast; (b) metalinguistic feedback; (c) no feedback and participated in form-focused production activities. A grammaticality judgment pretest and posttest were administrated to measure participants’ development on the explicit knowledge of perfective past tense morphology. After the treatment, participants were divided in the database into high and low beginner students based on their performance on a placement test administrated prior to the treatment. Results revealed that the groups that received corrective feedback outperformed the control group, while no statistical significance was found between the two treatment groups. Moreover, high-beginner learners benefited equally from both feedback types, whereas low-beginner learners benefited significantly from metalinguistic feedback.

Corpus-based study of L3 acquisition on Spanish past tense: evidence from learners’ oral production

<p>This paper focuses on a corpus-based study on the acquisition of L3 Spanish past tense in oral production through a learners’ corpus. The main findings were: (1) Chinese-speaking learners in Taiwan demonstrated more accurate uses of the Spanish preterit than the imperfect in oral productions, same as the findings in their written productions and those in Englishnative speakers of Spanish; (2) These learners used telic verbs more correctly than those of activity and state in preterit form in both oral and written productions; (3) The developmental pattern of the Spanish past tense in the oral production of Chinesespeakinglearners was similar to that of English-speaking learners of Spanish.</p>

The Effect of Teacher Feedback on the Simple Past Tense Acquisition in Senior High School Students' English Writing

Teacher feedback is an essential part which can not be overlooked in English writing teaching. Whether teacherfeedback is effective and which type of feedback is more effective in improving learners’ writing proficiency haveattracted more and more researchers’ attention. Direct feedback is the feedback that teachers correct students’ errorsdirectly under the form or the right using habit of target language. Indirect feedback is the feedback that teachersonly mark out or point out students’ errors but not correct errors. This study explores the effects of two differentkinds of feedback (direct feedback and indirect feedback) on the acquisition of English simple past tense in highschool students’ writing. And it attempts to answer the following three questions: 1) Do teachers’ direct and indirectfeedback in English writing influence senior high school students’ acquisition of simple past tense? 2) If so, whichkind of feedback (direct or indirect feedback) has the greater influence on improving students’ acquisition of simplepast tense in English writing? 3) What perceptions do students have towards teachers’ direct and indirect feedback inEnglish writing?The result showed that the two kinds of feedback have an influence on the acquisition of the target structure,however, there is no significant difference between direct and indirect feedback group, which states that indirectfeedback class was not better than direct feedback class.

Feature reassembly across closely related languages: L1 French vs. L1 Portuguese learning of L2 Spanish Past Tenses

ABSTRACTConsidering the acquisition of past tense uses by L2 Spanish advanced learners with closely related L1s (French, Portuguese), this study attempts to identify factors associated with variability, such as negative transfer or interface integration. We report data on the acquisition, by adult L1 French and Portuguese learners at B2 and C1 CEFR levels, of Spanish tense-aspect morphology: simple and compound past (SP, CP), imperfect (IMP), progressive (PROG), and pluperfect (PLP) forms, and from a control group of European Spanish speakers’ use and interpretation of these tenses. Data were collected through a film oral retell and two written interpretation tasks; the second written task (a follow-up task), was performed only by L1 French speakers. In the oral task, comparing both L1 backgrounds, negative transfer is more pervasive for the Portuguese groups. However, in the interpretation tasks, the French speakers showed greater difficulties, linked not only to L1 transfer but also to nonprototypical tense/aspect associations and pragmatically based temporal reference. The data suggest, in relation to Lardiere’s (2008, 2009) Feature Reassembly Hypothesis, that both feature reassembly and interface integration are sources of variability in the acquisition of L2 interpretable features that are also present in the L1.

A Longitudinal Study on the Korean Past Tense Acquisition : Focused on the Interview of L1 Chinese Learners

This paper examines the acquisition of tense-aspect morphology in two Chinese learners of Korean. This paper has been designed to track developmental aspect of past tense form and to verify the Aspect Hypothesis through a longitudinal corpus. It was found that (1) two children use past tense form predominantly with [+telic] (accomplishment/ achievement verbs) than [-telic] (action/ state verbs); (2) in the stage 1 and stage 4, they use past tense form with accomplishment verbs the most; (3) in the stage 2 and stage 3, they use past tense form with achievement verbs the most. The result shows the pattern of the development of tense-aspect form is based on prototype formation (the correlations between verbs with [+telic] and past tense form `-ess-`) partially from non-past tense errors in the past tense obligatory contexts; the pattern in the early development of tense-aspect of Chinese acquisition of Korean have gaps with earlier studies.

Cross-Linguistic Cognitive Modeling of Verbal Morphology Acquisition

How children acquire and process inflectional morphology is still an open question. Despite the fact that English past tense acquisition has been studied and modeled in depth, the current approaches do not account for many of the errors made by humans. Moreover, not much work has been done with highly inflected languages, like Spanish. However, the modeling of any linguistic phenomenon in different languages is very important in order to understand the general cognitive processes underlying each particular phenomenon. This paper presents an ACT-R dual-mechanism model that accomplishes the task of acquiring verbal morphology systems from one of the simplest systems (the English one) to one of the most complex systems (the Spanish one), by using a double analogy process of stem and suffix. The model proposed was able to match all types of errors that developing children make (from a sample of them), both in English and Spanish. The models for both languages used very similar parameters. The introduced approach not only shows how children could acquire a highly inflected morphology system in terms of dual-mechanism theories but, given its cross-linguistic character, also sheds light on the possible general processes involved in the acquisition and processing of inflectional morphology.

Competing past tense forms in English attrition

Aims and objectives: This paper examines longitudinal speech data from two Korean sisters, focusing on English irregular past tense forms to probe the course of attrition within the framework of the regression hypothesis, which suggests that language is lost in the reverse order of acquisition. During the course of attrition, evidence supporting one of the two irregular past tense acquisition theories (blocking vs competition hypothesis) is manifested. Methodology: The loss of English past tense forms of two girls who had lived in Anglophone Hawaii for two years before returning to Korea is tracked using free speech samples. Data and analysis: The children’s naturalistic speech data collected over a three-year period after their return is analyzed in terms of accuracy and error types. Findings/conclusions: Although the older sister did not exhibit clear signs of attrition, the constitution of the younger sibling’s licit and illicit past tense usage varied every year, reflecting her declining proficiency. The results also show that the path of attrition follows the prediction of the regression hypothesis. Originality: The prolonged attrition process of the sisters’ language use, which is unlike acquisition that can happen at a quick rate, demonstrated a relatively large window to witness their reshaping grammar at different interlanguage stages. Implications: The sisters’ irregular past forms retreating to a more rudimentary form provided an opportunity to support the competition model of irregular past tense acquisition. Their past tense accuracy and error analysis demonstrated various past tense forms in competition that could produce a different winner over different periods of time.

Teacher Feedback and the Acquisition of Simple Past Tense: A Case of EFL Learners

<p>English language teaching has been seeking new ways to teach grammar interactively. The present research looked into the crucial role of interactional feedback and focus on form in the acquisition of simple past tense in speaking tasks within a mixed-method approach. The study was conducted by the participation of 59 upper-intermediate learners between 17 to 30 years of age in 10 treatment sessions in an Iranian EFL (English as a foreign language) context. The learners were assigned into four groups of implicit, explicit, mixed, and control. The number of the structures focused in each interactional group varied, i.e. the implicit group received feedback as simple past, while the explicit was given corrective feedback (CF) on both simple past and past continuous. However, the mixed group dealt with simple past, past continuous, and also pronouns. Findings highlighted the effectiveness of CF since all the interactional groups could outperform the control group, which received no feedback type. Regarding the number of the structures focused, it was found that although implicit group only focused on a single structure, it could not outperform other groups. In other words, both explicit and mixed group performed significantly better than the implicit group in spite of being focused on more than one grammatical point. In sum, it could be inferred from the current study that the kind of feedback given to the learners, i.e. implicit or explicit, can lead to more opportunities of learning rather than being focused on a single structure. Therefore, teachers should provide learners with the correct form wherever possible without considering the number of points corrected in each feedback but by paying attention to the degree of explicitness of the CF given to the learners.</p>

The Effect of Lexical-Temporal-Indicator Prompt vs. Metalinguistic Prompt on The Field-Dependent EFL Learners’ Past Tense Acquisition

This study investigated the efficacy of lexical-temporal-indicator (LTI) prompt vs. metalinguistic prompt among field-dependent (FD) learners in their acquisition of past tense. To this end, four intact classes at Iran Language Institute (ILI) with a total number of 86 teenage learners at elementary level were selected. A Group Embedded Figures Test was utilized to specify field-dependent learners. A pretest with a focus on past tense was used to ascertain that the learners were not familiar with the targeted feature. Two groups out of four classes with an equal number of FD learners (n=17, n=17) received LTI and metalinguistic prompts as their treatments respectively. The one-month treatment was administered for the first 20 minutes of eight sessions. Then, an immediate parallel post-test was administered to compare the performance of the two groups. The findings revealed that FD learners receiving LTI prompt did better than those receiving metalinguistic prompt. Based on the findings, it can be concluded that LTI prompt is more favored than metalinguistic prompt by FD learners. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n3s2p482

Multiscale Modeling of Gene-Behavior Associations in an Artificial Neural Network Model of Cognitive Development.

In the multidisciplinary field of developmental cognitive neuroscience, statistical associations between levels of description play an increasingly important role. One example of such associations is the observation of correlations between relatively common gene variants and individual differences in behavior. It is perhaps surprising that such associations can be detected despite the remoteness of these levels of description, and the fact that behavior is the outcome of an extended developmental process involving interaction of the whole organism with a variable environment. Given that they have been detected, how do such associations inform cognitive-level theories? To investigate this question, we employed a multiscale computational model of development, using a sample domain drawn from the field of language acquisition. The model comprised an artificial neural network model of past-tense acquisition trained using the backpropagation learning algorithm, extended to incorporate population modeling and genetic algorithms. It included five levels of description-four internal: genetic, network, neurocomputation, behavior; and one external: environment. Since the mechanistic assumptions of the model were known and its operation was relatively transparent, we could evaluate whether cross-level associations gave an accurate picture of causal processes. We established that associations could be detected between artificial genes and behavioral variation, even under polygenic assumptions of a many-to-one relationship between genes and neurocomputational parameters, and when an experience-dependent developmental process interceded between the action of genes and the emergence of behavior. We evaluated these associations with respect to their specificity (to different behaviors, to function vs. structure), to their developmental stability, and to their replicability, as well as considering issues of missing heritability and gene-environment interactions. We argue that gene-behavior associations can inform cognitive theory with respect to effect size, specificity, and timing. The model demonstrates a means by which researchers can undertake multiscale modeling with respect to cognition and develop highly specific and complex hypotheses across multiple levels of description.

The Effects of Pre- versus Post-Presentation Input Flooding via Reading on the Young Iranian EFL Learners’ Acquisition of Simple Past Tense

The purpose of this study was to find out the possible effects of pre-versus post-presentation input flooding via reading on simple past tense acquisition among young Iranian EFL learners. Sixty one elementary EFL learners were divided into two experimental and one control group. The experimental groups were exposed to pre and post presentation input flooding via reading while the control group received the traditional method of teaching grammar at a private language institute. A dictogloss activity was also used to check the number of ongoing grammatical errors in all groups. The treatment was conducted in thirty minutes of twelve sessions for about two months. ANCOVA and one way ANOVA results of both post-test and dictogloss indicated the significant effects of pre- and post-presentation input flooding via reading on the acquisition of simple past tense. However, the results of posttest indicated that pre- and post-presentation input flooding groups performed fairly similarly while the results of dictogloss showed the outperformance of the former to the latter.

The effects of Processing Instruction on the acquisition of English simple past tense: Age and cognitive task demands

AbstractThe present study investigates the effects of Processing Instruction on two different age groups and the role that cognitive task demands might play in the results generated by Processing Instruction. This study includes school-age children and adult native speakers of German learning English as a foreign language – a language combination not previously investigated within the Processing Instruction and individual differences research paradigm. The present study investigates directly whether two different age groups will benefit equally from Processing Instruction in altering their reliance on lexical temporal indicators and redirecting their attention to verb forms on Processing Instruction activities with different cognitive demands. The grammatical feature chosen for this study is the English past simple tense marking tested on both interpretation and production measures. The results from this study provide further evidence that the Processing Instruction is an effective instructional treatment in helping school-age children and adult L2 learners to make accurate form-meaning connections. The results from the first sentence-level interpretation task and the production task showed that Processing Instruction has positive and equal effects on both age groups (school-age learners and adults). The positive effects of instruction were maintained over the delayed post-test for both age groups who made similar gains on the immediate post-test. The results from the second (cognitively more complex) sentence-level interpretation task indicated that the adults made greater gains than school-age learners. However, both groups retained the positive effects of instruction over time. The difference in gains between the two age groups on the second sentence-level interpretation task can be explained in terms of cognitive processing load.

Rule-based learning of regular past tense in children with specific language impairment

The treatment of children with specific language impairment was used as a means to investigate whether a single- or dual-mechanism theory best conceptualizes the acquisition of English past tense. The dual-mechanism theory proposes that regular English past-tense forms are produced via a rule-based process whereas past-tense forms of irregular verbs are stored in the lexicon. Single-mechanism theories propose that both regular and irregular past-tense verbs are stored in the lexicon. Five 5-year-olds with specific language impairment received treatment for regular past tense. The children were tested on regular past-tense production and third-person singular “s” twice before treatment and once after treatment, at eight-week intervals. Treatment consisted of one-hour play-based sessions, once weekly, for eight weeks. Crucially, treatment focused on different lexical items from those in the test. Each child demonstrated significant improvement on the untreated past-tense test items after treatment, but no improvement on the untreated third-person singular “s”. Generalization to untreated past-tense verbs could not be attributed to a frequency effect or to phonological similarity of trained and tested items. It is argued that the results are consistent with a dual-mechanism theory of past-tense inflection.

Past tense productivity in Dutch children with and without SLI: the role of morphophonology and frequency

This study focuses on morphophonology and frequency in past tense production. It was assessed whether Dutch five- and seven-year-old typically developing (TD) children and eight-year-old children with specific language impairment (SLI) produce the correct allomorph in regular, irregular, and novel past tense formation. Type frequency of the allomorph, token frequency and phonotactic probability (PP) of the novel verb form are considered. The results showed all groups were sensitive to the phonological cue. PP did not contribute to past tense inflection of novel verbs in any of the groups, but type frequency did in all three groups. Only the seven-year-old typically developing children relied on token frequency for inflection of regulars. The findings point to an important role of phonology and frequency in past tense acquisition for both TD children and children with SLI. We discuss how the SLI performance pattern relates to theories on SLI.

Modeling socioeconomic status effects on language development.

Socioeconomic status (SES) is an important environmental predictor of language and cognitive development, but the causal pathways by which it operates are unclear. We used a computational model of development to explore the adequacy of manipulations of environmental information to simulate SES effects in English past-tense acquisition, in a data set provided by Bishop (2005). To our knowledge, this is the first application of computational models of development to SES. The simulations addressed 3 new challenges: (a) to combine models of development and individual differences in a single framework, (b) to expand modeling to the population level, and (c) to implement both environmental and genetic/intrinsic sources of individual differences. The model succeeded in capturing the qualitative patterns of regularity effects in both population performance and the predictive power of SES that were observed in the empirical data. The model suggested that the empirical data are best captured by relatively wider variation in learning abilities and relatively narrow variation in (and good quality of) environmental information. There were shortcomings in the model's quantitative fit, which are discussed. The model made several novel predictions, with respect to the influence of SES on delay versus giftedness, the change of SES effects over development, and the influence of SES on children of different ability levels (gene-environment interactions). The first of these predictions was that SES should reliably predict gifted performance in children but not delayed performance, and the prediction was supported by the Bishop data set. Finally, the model demonstrated limits on the inferences that can be drawn about developmental mechanisms on the basis of data from individual differences.

Is Danish difficult to acquire? Evidence from Nordic past-tense studies

Cross-linguistic findings have shown that Danish children's early receptive vocabulary development is slower relative to children learning other languages. In this study, we examined whether Danish children's acquisition of inflectional past-tense morphology is delayed relative to Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish children. Our comparison of data from experimental studies of 4-, 6-, and 8-year-old children's past-tense acquisition revealed that Danish children scored lowest across all measures of past tense. Analyses of the morphological and phonetic characteristics of these languages suggest that phonetic differences in strength and salience of cues relevant for the identification and segmentation of suffixes may account for cross-linguistic differences. The results support the hypothesis that the phonetic structure of Danish may delay these children's language development relative to other languages.

Acquiring Regular and Irregular Past Tense Morphemes in English and French: Evidence From Bilingual Children

The aim of this study was to use crosslinguistic data from French‐English bilinguals to test two models of past tense acquisition: (a) single route (all past tense forms rely on morphophonological schemas) and (b) dual route (irregular forms are learned as words, regulars through rules). These models make similar predictions about English acquisition, the focus of most previous research. French irregular verbs are often low in token frequency but high in family resemblance. Past tense forms of regular and irregular verbs in English and French were elicited from children between 3 and 5 years of age. Both models could explain most results. Two findings with French were more compatible with a single‐route model, suggesting that this is a stronger explanation for crosslinguistic data.