Regular Past Forms Research Articles

Comparative analysis of morphosyntactic rule learning among monolingual, bilingual, and trilingual speakers: a study on Spanish preterite forms

ABSTRACT The research on language acquisition and retention has primarily focused on monolinguals and bilinguals, with comparatively few studies including trilinguals. To address this gap, the current study compares the acquisition and retention of a novel morphosyntactic rule in Spanish in twelve monolinguals, twelve bilinguals, and twelve trilinguals. The participants underwent training on the preterite verb tense in Spanish, and their ability to correctly identify the rule was tested after two days of training. The study also investigated the effect of verb type on the acquisition of novel morphosyntactic rules in monolinguals and multilinguals. The results revealed that all participants performed better during the delayed retention phase than the other phases. However, bilingual participants demonstrated significantly better accuracy in identifying newly learned tense forms than their monolingual and trilingual counterparts. The study also revealed that regular past tense forms were easier to learn than irregular past tense forms. Overall, the findings from this study suggest that individuals who speak more than two languages may face challenges in acquiring additional languages.

Foreign Language Processing of English Regular and Irregular Past Tense Verbs by Arabic-Speaking EFL Children

Purpose. This paper examines whether irregular past verbs are acquired earlier than regular past verbs by Arabic-speaking EFL children.
 Methods and procedure. Ninety fifth graders were tested using pictures representing 20 regular and 20 irregular past tense verbs through a sentence completion task. An introspective session was conducted with 70 children following the administration of the tests in order to determine the areas of difficulty. 
 Results. The results mainly revealed that there is a statistically significant difference between regular and irregular verbs in favour of regular verbs. This suggests that the children learn regular forms prior to irregular ones contradicting the Natural Order Hypothesis and providing credence to the two Interlanguage strategies, namely, the L2 Overgeneralization of Alternative L2 Category Strategy and L1 Transfer Strategy. The children’s failure to produce the irregular form of the verb can be ascribed to the default system that they rely on, which is the computation system rather than the storage system. Thus, Arabic-speaking EFL children apply regular inflection of -ed whenever their memory fails to produce an irregular verb form.
 Conclusions. This study has demonstrated that Arabic-speaking EFL children do not follow the same sequence of acquisition as that exhibited by first language learners in acquiring the regular and irregular simple past forms. These learners acquire the regular past tense forms prior to the irregular ones contradicting the Natural Order Hypothesis. Due to the lack of irregularities in their first language, these learners apply the regular inflection rule to novel or unfamiliar verbs without sometimes considering the possibility of an existent irregular form that needs to be retrieved from memory. This also provides credence to two Interlanguage strategies, namely, the L2 Overgeneralization of Alternative L2 Category Strategy and L1 Transfer Strategy. More studies that investigate the sequence of acquisition of other types of morphemes by Arabic-speaking EFL children are needed to explore the effect of L1 and other factors such as the learning situation on the acquisition of English morphemes.

Sensitivity to Regular and Irregular Past Tense Morphology in Native Speakers and Second Language Learners of English: Evidence From Intermediate-to-Advanced Persian Speakers of L2 English.

This study investigates whether L2 learners (L2ers) use the same mechanisms as those of native English speakers (NSs) for processing regular and irregular past tense forms. Intermediate-to-advanced Persian-English L2ers and NSs participated in two online experiments using Speeded Grammaticality Judgment tasks. Experiment 1 examined regular and irregular past tense forms and Experiment 2 the effect of frequency on regular past tense forms. The results of both the accuracy and reaction time data show a pattern of convergence between NSs and L2ers. Particularly, the accuracy data provide new evidence showing that L2ers converge on NSs in showing distinct processes for regular and irregular tense forms. Additionally, both groups similarly showed an anti-frequency effect for regular verbs, i.e., the frequency increased accuracy rates for low-frequency regular verbs in comparison to high-frequency ones. It is concluded that L2ers use mechanisms similar to those of NSs for processing regular and irregular past tense forms.

New and old puzzles in the morphological conditioning of coronal stop deletion

AbstractThis paper probes the well-documented morphological effect on coronal stop deletion (CSD, also called /t,d/-deletion), by which there is more deletion in monomorphemes like mist than in regular past tense forms like missed. We observe that there are, in principle, additional morphological distinctions that could be made within each category: for instance, the “regular past” category contains perfect and passive participles; the “monomorpheme” category typically contains compounds and suffixed forms. We demonstrate that several of these newly introduced distinctions actually have significant effects on CSD rates in a corpus of Philadelphia English. And we argue that these new distinctions are worth attending to because they have consequences for two existing accounts of the basic morphological effect. In each case, we show that the existing accounts do not straightforwardly capture the additional significant distinctions we identify, calling the explanatory power of those accounts into question.

Effects of the 4/3/2 activity revisited: Extending Boers (2014) and Thai & Boers (2016)

Whereas scholars have extensively researched the pedagogical potential of 4/3/2 activities (i.e. increasing time pressure in task repetition) for enhancing second language (L2) fluency, its impact on L2 accuracy remains unclear. To help L2 learners improve both fluency and accuracy, the present study examined the effects of adding accuracy enhancement (AE) as a form of delayed metalinguistic correction to the 4/3/2 activity on the development of L2 fluency (speed, breakdown, repair) and accuracy (the acquisition of irregular and regular forms of English past tense). A total of 36 university-level students participated in three 20-minute dyadic sessions. They were randomly divided into three groups: Control, 4/3/2 and 4/3/2+AE. Whereas the 4/3/2 group repeated a monologue task three times with increasing time pressure (4 → 3 → 2 minutes), those in the 4/3/2+AE received metalinguistic correction from the researcher during the 4/3/2 activity. According to the results, a combined approach, 4/3/2+AE, simultaneously impacted learners’ overall fluency and accuracy across different topics. However, certain aspects of their fluency and accuracy development, especially those related to linguistic encoding (reduction in pauses within clauses; regular past tense forms), remained unchanged.

Frequency Effects of Regular Past Tense Forms in English on Native Speakers’ and Second Language Learners’ Accuracy Rate and Reaction Time

There is substantial debate over the mental representation of regular past tense forms in both first language (L1) and second language (L2) processing. Specifically, the controversy revolves around the nature of morphologically complex forms such as the past tense –ed in English and how morphological structures of such forms are represented in the mental lexicon. This study focuses on the results of a speeded acceptability judgment task testing English regular past tense forms of high- and low frequencies. In this task, participants judged the acceptability of sentences as quickly and accurately as possible. Thirty-two intermediate-to-advanced L1 Persian and L1 Arabic speakers (L2ers) and twenty-two Native speakers (NSs) of English made acceptability judgments for regular past tense forms of high- and low-frequency verbs in sentential contexts. Considering participants’ reaction times (RTs) and accuracy rates as the dependent variables, the main results are as follows. Despite NSs’ faster RTs and higher accuracy scores, both groups demonstrated the same pattern of accuracy rates and RTs. Specifically, for accuracy data, regular verbs yielded a reverse frequency effect or anti-frequency effect in both groups (i.e., lower accuracy rates for high- than low-frequency regular forms in NSs as well as L2ers). For RT data, while the NSs exhibited a marginally anti-frequency effect, the L2ers displayed a nonsignificant trend for the anti-frequency effect. These results support the dual-mechanism models suggesting that the mental mechanisms and representations of inflectional morphology are the same in NSs and intermediate-to-advanced L2ers.

The English past tense debate in the Chinese EFL learners’ mind: a masked priming study

Abstract The involvement of rule-based computation is the focus of the past tense debate. The present masked priming study contributed to the debate by investigating how Chinese EFL learners processed regular English past tense forms. The results show that, for the past tense forms of relatively high frequency, at the early stage of processing, the highly proficient group can make use of morphological rule to decompose regular past tense forms. The lower proficiency level group, however, cannot decompose past tense forms. It is suggested that surface form frequency of past tense inflections and foreign language proficiency are the two factors that affect the way complex words are processed. Our data supports the dual-route model of Declarative-Procedural memory in the past tense debate.

English Past Tense Morphology in Adult Arab EFL learners: Mental Representation Mechanism and Types of Errors

English past tense morphology is one of the most difficult but yet one of the most important areas in the acquisition of English language by L2 Learners. The objectives of this study were to: (a) determine the acquisition sequence of English regular and irregular past tense forms in adult Arab EFL learners; (b) identify whether English past tense forms are represented by a single mechanism or a dual mechanism, and (c) investigate types of errors that L2 learners produce in their acquisition of English past tense morphology. In total, 77 adult Arab EFL learners participated in an oral production task. The use of the verbal inflectional morphemes in obligatory contexts in each learners production is examined. The results show that L2 learners acquire the past tense morphology of the regular verbs before they acquire the past tense morphology of the irregular verbs and that there is frequency effect for the irregular verbs, but not for the regular verbs. This indicates that the dual system theory accounts for the mental representations of English past tense forms for the L2 learners in this study. The most frequent error types produced by the Learners are omission, overregularization and overgeneration of be forms.

How Germans prepare for the English past tense: Silent production of inflected words during EEG

ABSTRACTProcesses involved in late bilinguals’ production of morphologically complex words were studied using an event-related brain potentials (ERP) paradigm in which EEGs were recorded during participants’ silent productions of English past- and present-tense forms. Twenty-three advanced second language speakers of English (first language [L1] German) were compared to a control group of 19 L1 English speakers from an earlier study. We found a frontocentral negativity for regular relative to irregular past-tense forms (e.g., asked vs. held) during (silent) production, and no difference for the present-tense condition (e.g., asks vs. holds), replicating the ERP effect obtained for the L1 group. This ERP effect suggests that combinatorial processing is involved in producing regular past-tense forms, in both late bilinguals and L1 speakers. We also suggest that this paradigm is a useful tool for future studies of online language production.

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.

FMRI evidence for the involvement of the procedural memory system in morphological processing of a second language.

Behavioural evidence suggests that English regular past tense forms are automatically decomposed into their stem and affix (played = play+ed) based on an implicit linguistic rule, which does not apply to the idiosyncratically formed irregular forms (kept). Additionally, regular, but not irregular inflections, are thought to be processed through the procedural memory system (left inferior frontal gyrus, basal ganglia, cerebellum). It has been suggested that this distinction does not to apply to second language (L2) learners of English; however, this has not been tested at the brain level. This fMRI study used a masked-priming task with regular and irregular prime-target pairs (played-play/kept-keep) to investigate morphological processing in native and highly proficient late L2 English speakers. No between-groups differences were revealed. Compared to irregular pairs, regular pairs activated the pars opercularis, bilateral caudate nucleus and the right cerebellum, which are part of the procedural memory network and have been connected with the processing of morphologically complex forms. Our study is the first to provide evidence for native-like involvement of the procedural memory system in processing of regular past tense by late L2 learners of English.

Past tense in the brain's time: Neurophysiological evidence for dual-route processing of past-tense verbs

A controversial issue in neuro- and psycholinguistics is whether regular past-tense forms of verbs are stored lexically or generated productively by the application of abstract combinatorial schemas, for example affixation rules. The success or failure of models in accounting for this particular issue can be used to draw more general conclusions about cognition and the degree to which abstract, symbolic representations and rules are psychologically and neurobiologically real. This debate can potentially be resolved using a neurophysiological paradigm, in which alternative predictions of the brain response patterns for lexical and syntactic processing are put to the test. We used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to record neural responses to spoken monomorphemic words ('hide'), pseudowords ('smide'), regular past-tense forms ('cried') and ungrammatical (overregularised) past-tense forms ('flied') in a passive listening oddball paradigm, in which lexically and syntactically modulated stimuli are known to elicit distinct patterns of the mismatch negativity (MMN) brain response. We observed an enhanced ('lexical') MMN to monomorphemic words relative to pseudowords, but a reversed ('syntactic') MMN to ungrammatically inflected past tenses relative to grammatical forms. This dissociation between responses to monomorphemic and bimorphemic stimuli indicates that regular past tenses are processed more similarly to syntactic sequences than to lexically stored monomorphemic words, suggesting that regular past tenses are generated productively by the application of a combinatorial scheme to their separately represented stems and affixes. We suggest discrete combinatorial neuronal assemblies, which bind classes of sequentially occurring lexical elements into morphologically complex units, as the neurobiological basis of regular past tense inflection.

They played with the trade: MEG investigation of the processing of past tense verbs and their phonological twins

How regular and irregular verbs are processed remains a matter of debate. Some English-speaking patients with nonfluent aphasia are especially impaired on regular past-tense forms like played, whether the task requires production, comprehension or even the judgement that “play” and “played” sound different. Within a dual-mechanism account of inflectional morphology, these deficits reflect disruption to the rule-based process that adds (or strips) the suffix -ed to regular verb stems; but the fact that the patients are also impaired at detecting the difference between word pairs like “tray” and “trade” (the latter being a phonological but not a morphological twin to “played”) suggests an important role for phonological characteristics of the regular past tense. The present study examined MEG brain responses in healthy participants evoked by spoken regular past-tense forms and phonological twin words (plus twin pseudowords and a non-speech control) presented in a passive oddball paradigm. Deviant forms (played, trade, kwade/kwayed) relative to their standards (play, tray, kway) elicited a pronounced neuromagnetic response at approximately 130ms after the onset of the affix; this response was maximal at sensors over temporal areas of both hemispheres but stronger on the left, especially for played and kwayed. Relative to the same standards, a different set of deviants ending in /t/―—plate, trait and kwate—―produced stronger difference responses especially over the right hemisphere. Results are discussed with regard to dual- and single-mechanism theories of past tense processing and the need to consider neurobiological evidence in attempts to understand inflectional morphology.

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.

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.

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.

The processing of English regular inflections: Phonological cues to morphological structure

Previous studies suggest that different neural and functional mechanisms are involved in the analysis of irregular (caught) and regular (filled) past tense forms in English. In particular, the comprehension and production of regular forms is argued to require processes of morpho-phonological assembly and disassembly, analysing these forms into a stem plus an inflectional affix (e.g., {fill}+{-ed}), as opposed to irregular forms, which do not have an overt stem+affix structure and must be analysed as full forms [Marslen-Wilson, W. D., & Tyler, L. K. (1997). Dissociating types of mental computation. Nature, 387, 592–594; Marslen-Wilson, W. D., & Tyler, L. K. (1998). Rules, representations, and the English past tense. Trends in Cognitive Science, 2, 428–435]. On this account, any incoming string that shows the critical diagnostic properties of an inflected form – a final coronal consonant (/t/, /d/, /s/, /z/) that agrees in voicing with the preceding segment as in filled, mild, or nilled – will automatically trigger an attempt at segmentation. We report an auditory speeded judgment experiment which explored the contribution of these critical morpho-phonological properties (labelled as the English inflectional rhyme pattern) to the processing of English regular inflections. The results show that any stimulus that can be interpreted as ending in a regular inflection, whether it is a real inflection (filled–fill), a pseudo-inflection (mild–mile) or a phonologically matched nonword (nilled–nill), is responded to more slowly than an unambiguously monomorphemic stimulus pair (e.g., belt–bell). This morpho-phonological effect was independent of phonological effects of voicing and syllabicity. The findings are interpreted as evidence for a basic morpho-phonological parsing process that applies to all items with the criterial phonological properties.

Morphologically complex words in L1 and L2 processing: Evidence from masked priming experiments in English

This paper reports results from masked priming experiments investigating regular past-tense forms and deadjectival nominalizations with -ness and -ity in adult native (L1) speakers of English and in different groups of advanced adult second language (L2) learners of English. While the L1 group showed efficient priming for both inflected and derived word forms, the L2 learners demonstrated repetition-priming effects (like the L1 group), but no priming for inflected and reduced priming for derived word forms. We argue that this striking contrast between L1 and L2 processing supports the view that adult L2 learners rely more on lexical storage and less on combinatorial processing of morphologically complex words than native speakers.

Can word formation be understood or understanded by semantics alone?

Arguments concerning the relative role of semantic and grammatical factors in word formation have proven to be a wedge issue in current debates over the nature of linguistic representation and processing. In the present paper, we re-examine claims by Ramscar [Ramscar, M. (2002). The role of meaning in inflection: Why the past tense does not require a rule. Cognitive Psychology, 45, 45–94.] that it is semantic rather than grammatical factors that influence the choice of regular or irregular past tense forms for English verbs. In Experiment 1, we first replicated Ramscar’s (2002) experiment, which showed semantic influences on choice of past tense inflection. A novel verb, splink, was introduced in a semantic context that was reminiscent of an existing regular or irregular rhyme verb: blink or drink. Participants favored the past tense form ( splinked or splank) that matched that of the semantically similar verb. In Experiment 2, we introduced novel verbs in a context suggesting that they were grammatically derived from nouns (i.e., denominals). Some current symbolic processing models propose that regular past tense forms should be preferred for such forms. When Ramscar’s (2002) original contexts for derivational verbs were re-tested in this condition, we replicated his failure to find a preference for regular past tense forms. However, when the contexts were modified to make the grammatical process more salient, we did find a preference for regular past tense forms, suggesting that the derivational status might have been ambiguous in the original materials. In Experiment 3, we tested whether acceptability ratings for regular or irregular past tense forms of grammatically derived verbs could be explained by semantic distance metrics or by ratings of noun-to-verb derivational status. Ratings of semantic distance and grammatical derivation were orthogonal factors in Experiment 3. Only derivational status predicted acceptability ratings for regular past tense forms. Taken together, the present results suggest that semantic factors do not explain the regularization of irregular verbs in derivational contexts, although semantic factors can affect the choice of past tense forms in certain circumstances.