Past Forms Research Articles

Temporal reference marking in narrative and expository text written by deaf children and adults: A bimodal bilingual perspective

This study examined temporal reference marking in texts written by Dutch deaf children and adults who differed in sign language proficiency. The temporal reference marking systems in Dutch and Sign Language of the Netherlands (SLN) differ substantially, with Dutch having a wide range of lexical and morphological markers of temporal reference, and SLN relying on lexical marking of temporal reference. The results showed that the youngest proficient signers had difficulties with tense morphology: they avoided the marked past tense form in narratives and omitted verbs, but showed no problems with lexical marking of temporal reference. In the older proficient signing writers, verb morphology emerged, and in proficient signing adults temporal reference marking resembled that of the hearing adults. This study shows that in order to gain more insight into deaf people's writing, it is important to adopt a bilingual perspective and take variations in sign language proficiency into account.

Do young bilinguals acquire past tense morphology like monolinguals, only later? Evidence from French–English and Chinese–English bilinguals

ABSTRACTPrevious studies have shown that preschool bilingual children lag behind same-aged monolinguals in their production of correct past tense forms. This lag has been attributed to bilinguals' less frequent exposure to either language. If so, bilingual children acquire the past tense like monolinguals, only later. In this study, we compared the English past tense production of Chinese–English bilingual children with a matched sample of French–English bilinguals (5–12 years old). The results showed small but reliable differences in the children's past tense production (e.g., the kinds of errors the children made) that could be attributed to knowledge of the other language. Both groups of children showed equivalent rates of accuracy, suggesting that bilinguals exposed to naturalistic speech acquire the past tense much like monolinguals do, only later and with some effects, most likely morphophonological, from their other language.

Norm vs variation in British English irregular verbs: the case of past tensesangvssung

In this article I discuss the persistence of non-standard past tense forms in traditional and modern dialect data in the face of strong prescriptive norms against such non-standard forms. Past tense forms likeshe drunkorthey sungare still encountered frequently, although prescriptive grammars have militated against such usage for over a century, as a detailed investigation of nineteenth-century grammar books can show. I will argue that an increasing insistence especially by British nineteenth-century grammarians on distinct paradigm forms likedrink – drank – drunkis based on a (mistaken) Latin ideal and that it has not carried much weight with the ‘average’ speaker for functional reasons: non-standard forms in <u> can be functionally motivated and are more ‘natural’ past tense forms in the sense of Wurzel (1984).

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.

Effects of Negative and Positive Evidence on Adult Word Learning

This study compared negative and positive evidence in adult word learning, predicting that adults would learn more forms following negative evidence. Ninety‐two native English speakers (32 men and 60 women [Mage= 20.38 years, SD = 2.80]), learned nonsense nouns and verbs provided within English frames. Later, participants produced plural and past tense forms for the irregular nouns and verbs following negative or positive evidence. As anticipated, correct production followed negative evidence, and errors followed positive evidence. Additionally, participants learned more verbs than nouns. Implications for first and second language learning are discussed.

The Acquisition of the Simple Past Tense by First-form Pupils in an English Immersion Programme

Learners of English as a second language frequently make mistakes in their use of the L2. Prévost & White (2000) report that the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis (MSIH) suggests that learners know the underlying functional category, but cannot always produce the correct surface form. The present study aims to test this hypothesis by investigating the development of the simple past tense of pupils in bilingual (TTO) and regular secondary education. Therefore, first-form pupils of bilingual and regular Α-level were investigated. The children performed two writing assignments: one at the start of the year and another one four months later (just after the Christmas holidays). The TTO-pupils showed more progress in their acquisition of past tense forms of English as compared to regular Α-level pupils and they were more creative in their language use, as was visible in the mistakes they made. Furthermore, no pupil used only non-finite forms. Thus, the findings indicate that the MSIH appears to be correct.

Preverbation and narrativity in Lithuanian. The distribution of finite simplex and compound verbs in narrative main clauses

The article deals with the use of simplex and compound (prefixed) verbs in narrative text. Main clauses comprising finite verb forms in the past and in the past habitual tense are examined in an attempt to establish to what extent simplex and compound verbs exhibit aspect oppositions, and whether a correlation exists between the occurrence of simplex vs. compound verbs and distinct textual units. The investigation shows that although simple and compound verbs in Lithuanian are not in direct aspect opposition to each other, in the background text portions most of the verbs are prefixless past tense forms or habitual forms, whereas in the plot-advancing text portions, the vast majority of verbs are compound verbs in the simple past tense.

Preschoolers trust particular informants when learning new names and new morphological forms

Across three studies, we investigated whether 4-year-olds would trust a previously reliable informant when learning novel morphological forms. In Experiment 1, children (N= 16) were presented with two informants: one who correctly named familiar objects and another who named them incorrectly. Children were invited to turn to these informants when learning novel labels and morphological forms. The majority of children chose the previously correct labeller when learning novel label and morphology. In Experiment 2, children (N= 16) were presented with an informant who used familiar plurals correctly and one who used them incorrectly. Children chose the previously correct morphologist when learning novel labels and past tense forms. Thus, children track both semantic and morphological accuracy. In Experiment 3, some children (N= 16) were presented with two informants who differed in naming accuracy, whereas others (N= 16) were presented with two informants who differed in morphological accuracy. To forestall any risk of experimenter cuing, one experimenter blind to the training children had received, tested children with novel labels and morphology. The results replicated those of Experiments 1 and 2. Implications for how children's trust in an informant might play a role in their acquisition of morphological forms are discussed.

Lexical semantics and irregular inflection

Whether a word has an irregular inflection does not depend on its sound alone: compare lie-lay (recline) and lie-lied (prevaricate). Theories of morphology, particularly connectionist and symbolic models, disagree on which nonphonological factors are responsible. We test four possibilities: (1) lexical effects, in which two lemmas differ in whether they specify an irregular form; (2) semantic effects, in which the semantic features of a word become associated with regular or irregular forms; (3) morphological structure effects, in which a word with a headless structure (e.g., a verb derived from a noun) blocks access to a stored irregular form; and (4) compositionality effects, in which the stored combination of an irregular word's meaning (e.g., the verb's inherent aspect) with the meaning of the inflection (e.g., pastness) doesn't readily transfer to new senses with different combinations of such meanings. In four experiments, speakers were presented with existing and novel verbs and asked to rate their past-tense forms, semantic similarities, grammatical structure, and aspectual similarities. We found: (1) an interaction between semantic and phonological similarity, coinciding with reported strategies of analogising to known verbs and implicating lexical effects; (2) weak and inconsistent effects of semantic similarity; (3) robust effects of morphological structure; and (4) robust effects of aspectual compositionality. Results are consistent with theories of language that invoke lexical entries and morphological structure, and which differentiate the mode of storage of regular and irregular verbs. They also suggest how psycholinguistic processes have shaped vocabulary structure over history.

The role of Broca's area in regular past-tense morphology: An event-related potential study

It has been suggested that damage to anterior regions of the left hemisphere results in a dissociation in the perception and lexical activation of past-tense forms. Specifically, in a lexical-decision task in which past-tense primes immediately precede present-tense targets, such patients demonstrate significant priming for irregular verbs ( spoke– speak), but, unlike control participants, fail to do so for regular verbs ( looked– look). Here, this behavioral dissociation was first confirmed in a group of eleven patients with damage to the pars opercularis (BA 44) and pars triangularis (BA 45) of the left inferior frontal gyrus (i.e., Broca's area). Two conditions containing word-onset orthographic–phonological overlap ( bead– bee, barge– bar) demonstrated that the disrupted regular-verb priming was accompanied by, and covaried with, disrupted ortho-phonological priming, regardless of whether prime stimuli contained the regular inflectional rhyme pattern. Further, the dissociation between impaired regular-verb and preserved irregular-verb priming was shown to be continuous rather than categorical; priming for weak-irregular verbs ( spent– spend) was intermediate in size between that of regular verbs and strong verbs. Such continuous dissociations grounded in ortho-phonological relationships between present- and past-tense forms are predicted by single-system, connectionist approaches to inflectional morphology and not predicted by current dual-system, rule-based models. Event-related potential data demonstrated that N400 priming effects were intact for both regular and irregular verbs, suggesting that the absence of significant regular-verb priming in the response time data did not result from a disruption of lexical access, and may have stemmed instead from post-lexical events such as covert articulation, segmentation strategies, and/or cognitive control.

Passive Participle Marking by African American English–Speaking Children Reared in Poverty

In this study, the authors examined the linguistic profile of African American English (AAE)-speaking children reared in poverty by focusing on their marking of passive participles and by comparing the results with the authors' previous study of homophonous forms of past tense (S. Pruitt & J. Oetting, 2009). The data were from 45 five- to six-year-olds who spoke AAE and who participated in the authors' earlier study. Fifteen were classified as low-income (LSES); the others were classified as middle-income and served as either age- or language-matched controls. The data came from a probe that was designed by S. M. Redmond (2003), but it was modified to examine the morphological and phonological characteristics of AAE. Participle marking by all 3 groups was influenced by AAE phonology, but the LSES children marked the participles at lower rates than the controls. The LSES children's rates of participle marking were also lower than their rates of marking for homophonous forms of past tense. Unlike the children's rates of past-tense marking, their rates of participle marking were correlated to their vocabulary test scores. AAE-speaking children reared in poverty present weaknesses in aspects of grammatical morphology that are related to their vocabulary weaknesses.

Modulation of phonetic duration by morphological and lexical predictors.

This study investigates how the duration of the stem vowel of regular and irregular English verbs is modulated by tense (present and past), regularity, lexical frequency, gang size of the vocalic alternation, imageability ratings, and vowel quality. The vocalic durations of 48 monosyllabic irregular verbs and 171 regular verbs were extracted from the Buckeye Corpus of spontaneous speech. A linear mixed effects regression model revealed that vowels of past tense forms tend to have longer durations than vowels of present tense forms, that vowels of words that are less imageable are realized with shorter durations, and that tense vowels are longer than lax vowels. Surprisingly, higher frequency irregular past tense forms were produced with longer vowels, contradicting Aylett and Turk [(2004); (2006)] and Bell et al. [(2003); (2009)]. Further, vowels were shorter for irregular verbs with larger vocalic alternation gangs, contradicting the predictions of Kuperman et al. [(2007)] but supporting hypotheses that units with a smaller information load have shorter durations. This pattern of results is interpreted as a consequence of the pressure for regularization during the production of irregular past tense forms.

Bilingual children's acquisition of the past tense: a usage-based approach

Bilingual and monolingual children's (mean age=4;10) elicited production of the past tense in both English and French was examined in order to test predictions from Usage-Based theory regarding the sensitivity of children's acquisition rates to input factors such as variation in exposure time and the type/token frequency of morphosyntactic structures. Both bilingual and monolingual children were less accurate with irregular than regular past tense forms in both languages. Bilingual children, as a group, were less accurate than monolinguals with the English regular and irregular past tense, and with the French irregular past tense, but not with the French regular past tense. However, bilingual children were as accurate as monolinguals with the past tense in their language of greater exposure, except for English irregular verbs. It is argued that these results support the view that children's acquisition rates are sensitive to input factors, but with some qualifications.

Homophone Dominance at the Whole-word and Sub-word Levels: Spelling Errors Suggest Full-form Storage of Regularly Inflected Verb Forms

Two experiments and two corpus studies focus on homophone dominance in the spelling of regularly inflected verb forms, the phenomenon that the higher-frequency homophone causes more intrusion errors on the lower-frequency one than vice versa. Experiment 1 was a speeded dictation task focusing on the Dutch imperative, a verb form whose formation rule is poorly known. A clear-cut effect of homophone dominance was found. This effect was equally strong when the target imperative was preceded by another imperative in the same sentence whose pronunciation reflected the spelling rule. Experiment 2 indicated that the effect of homophone dominance cannot be reduced to an effect of recency. Language users cannot discriminate a recently seen verb form when shown the two homophones. Instead, they choose the most frequent spelling pattern. In Corpus Study 1 a Google search on the world wide web revealed a sublexical effect of homophone dominance in the spelling errors on regular past tense forms. Corpus Study 2 demonstrated the validity of the search method. The sublexical effect of homophone dominance, involving units that cut across the stem-suffix boundary, lends itself naturally to a representational model of the connectionist or analogical processing tradition but is hard to reconcile with a rule-based account.

Testing the limits of language production in long-term survivors of major stroke: A psycholinguistic and anatomic study

Background: There is still a dearth of information about grammatical aspects of language production in aphasia. Aims: Making novel use of methods of elicited production aimed at testing the limits of competence, we studied three cases of chronic aphasia, stemming from major stroke. We asked: (1) Whether the elicited production method reveals sparing of language abilities not readily evidenced in spontaneous utterances or on conventional aphasia tests. (2) Which language production abilities survive damage to both Broca's region and Wernicke's region? Materials & Procedures: Targeted words, morphological and syntactic structures were elicited by sentence completion with supporting linguistic and visual context. Targets were never modelled during the procedure. For verbs, visual and auditory contexts emphasise completed actions, targeting past tense forms. Lesion description was based on structural MRI scans. Outcomes & Results: The three participants showed partially spared ability to produce nouns, adjectives, and verb stems in context. The elicitation method proved more productive in some cases than picture prompts or sentence prompts. Past tense inflections were usually omitted. Hence stems and inflections were dissociable. Two participants showed partial success with the passive, and no participant produced a full relative clause, including the relative pronoun, but two produced reduced forms of subject relatives. Partial sparing of production capability in these cases points to the likely importance of portions of the left hemisphere remote from Broca and Wernicke regions. Conclusions: This application of elicited production methodology demonstrates possibilities of lexical, morphological, and syntactic production not evident in spontaneous utterances or by conventional aphasia tests. Some lexical and grammatical capabilities survived massive damage to both anterior and posterior portions of the left hemisphere.

EFFECTS OF FORM-FOCUSED PRACTICE AND FEEDBACK ON CHINESE EFL LEARNERS’ ACQUISITION OF REGULAR AND IRREGULAR PAST TENSE FORMS

Conducted in English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) classrooms at the university level in China, this quasi-experimental study compared the effects of three different corrective feedback treatments on 72 Chinese learners’ use of regular and irregular English past tense. Three classes were randomly assigned to a prompt group, a recast group, or a control group and then participated in form-focused production activities that elicited the target forms. In the two feedback groups, teachers consistently provided one type of feedback (i.e., either recasts or prompts) in response to learners’ errors during the activities, whereas in the control group, the teacher provided feedback only on content. Pretests, immediate posttests, and delayed posttests administered 2 weeks after the treatment assessed participants’ acquisition of regular and irregular past tense forms in both oral and written production. Comparisons of group means across testing sessions using a repeated-measures ANOVA consistently revealed large effects for time. Post hoc within-group analyses of the eight immediate- and delayed-posttest measures revealed significant gains by the prompt group on all eight measures, the recast group on four, and the control group on three. The effects of prompts were larger than those of recasts for increasing accuracy in the use of regular past tense forms, whereas prompts and recasts had similar effects on improving accuracy in the use of irregular past tense forms.

Preterite be

In this paper I analyse variation in the use of past tense be in data from Morley, a suburb of Leeds, in the North of England, using both real-time and apparent-time data. Rather than concentrating on the traditional aspects of this variable, namely alternation between was and were, I identify four phonetic variants of the past tense be system. I propose that the community under consideration are adopting intermediate variants that, both in terms of perception and production, lie between the standard (British) realisations of was [wɒz] and were [wɜː]. A reallocation process has occurred between these two intermediate forms, along the lines of polarity. The inclusion of the intermediate forms of past tense be enables us to perceive previously unobserved patterns of variation with regard to this variable.

Semantic bias and morphological regularity in the acquisition of tense-aspect morphology: what is the relation?

This article reviews research on English past-tense acquisition to test the validity of the single mechanism model and the dual mechanism model, focusing on regular-irregular dissociation and semantic bias. Based on the review, it is suggested that in L1 acquisition, both regular and irregular verbs are governed by semantics; that is, early use of past tense forms are largely restricted to achievement verbs — regular or irregular. In contrast, some L2 acquisition studies show stronger semantic bias for regular past tense forms (Housen, The development of tense-aspect in English as a second language and the variable influence of inherent aspect, John Benjamins, 2002). It is argued that L1 acquisition of the past-tense morphology can be accounted for adequately — without assuming dual mechanisms — by relying on connectionist-like input-based prototype formation as a mechanism for the development of tense-aspect morphology.

Children's judgments of regular and irregular novel past-tense forms: New data on the English past-tense debate.

Is language governed by formal rules or by analogy to stored exemplars? The acquisition of the English past tense has long played a central role in this debate. In the present study, children rated the acceptability of a regular and an irregular past-tense form of each of 40 novel verbs (e.g., fleeped, flept) using a 5-point scale. The novel verbs were chosen to vary continuously along the orthogonal dimensions of (a) similarity to existing regular forms and (b) similarity to existing irregular forms. A developmental progression was observed whereby the acceptability of novel regulars was shown to increase as a function of similarity to existing regulars, with the magnitude of this effect increasing with age. The acceptability of novel irregulars was shown to increase as a function of similarity to existing irregulars, with no developmental changes observed. These findings are discussed in the light of 3 current models of past-tense acquisition: the single-route model (e.g., Bybee & Moder, 1983), the dual-route model (e.g., Prasada & Pinker, 1993), and the multiple-rules model (e.g., Albright & Hayes, 2003).

On Typology of Polish and French Imperfective

On Typology of Polish and French ImperfectiveThe aim of this paper is to present a typology of Polish imperfective past tense forms in the factual use for the purpose of creating a set of guidelines for their translation into French language. Although descriptions of factual imperfective aspect is not new to linguistics, both Polish and international, equivalence of its forms in other languages pose problems to foreigners and native speakers alike. This is especially true in French, where Polish past imperfective forms could be expressed by a number of past tenses. In order to proceed with our task we are going to adopt a classification of Polish imperfective verbal forms based on the following criteria: general factual meaning or specific (concrete) factual meaning as a primary measure and imperfective or perfective intention of the imperfective form as a secondary measure. Such systematization of the phenomenon in Polish will allow us to formulate guidelines of equivalence with French past tenses.