Investigating bilinguals’ sensitivity to English regular past morphology: A self-paced reading experiment with Brazilian learners

Abstract

It is known that adult learners of English as an additional language (EAL) have difficulty in producing inflectional morphemes such as the third person present singular -s and regular past -ed. One possible explanation is that bilinguals are not sensitive to inflectional morphemes, in comprehension tasks as evidenced by longer latencies at critical positions in reaction time experiments, when compared to native controls. Having the above in mind, the objective of this paper is to investigate if in fact Brazilian EAL bilinguals are sensitive to regular past morphology in a self-paced reading task. Sentences varied on the use or absence of inflectional morphemes. The statistical analysis showed that EAL speakers are not sensitive to past morphology. The results are discussed in light of Distributed Morphology and of previous studies on production and processing of inflectional morphemes in EAL. KEYWORDS: Bilingual processing; self-paced reading; inflectional morphology; Distributed Morphology RESUMO : É sabido que bilíngues do inglês como língua adicional (L2) têm dificuldade com a produção de morfemas flexionais, tais como -s da terceira pessoa singular do presente, e -ed de passado regular. Uma possível explicação 1 This study is part of a PhD Dissertation supervised by Dr. Ricardo de Souza and Dr. Maria Luiza Cunha Lima.RBLA, Belo Horizonte, v. 17, n.3, p. 2017 484 estaria na insensibilidade dos aprendizes em relação à presença dos morfemas flexionais, mostrado por latências maiores em experimentos de tempo de reação, quando comparados a latências de nativos. Tendo isto em vista, o objetivo deste estudo é investigar se bilíngues brasileiros são sensíveis ao morfema de passado em um experimento de leitura auto-cadenciada. A análise estatística dos resultados mostrou que bilíngues não são sensíveis ao morfema de passado. Os resultados são discutidos à luz da teoria de Morfologia Distribuída e de estudos anteriores sobre produção e processamento morfológico na L2.

The negative evidence hypothesis: the acquisition of the double-object construction by Brazilian-Portuguese English bilinguals

“…he Bottleneck Hypothesis, on the other hand, postulates that the most diicult structure for bilinguals to acquire is functional morphology because of the amount of information they carry and of their cross-linguistic variation. his hypothesis has been supported by studies that show bilinguals' behavior towards agreement markers (Carneiro, 2017;Jensen, 2016, Mikhaylova, 2018.…”

Processamento linguístico implícito de morfemas flexionais

“…We can find similarities between our findings and the ones in Jiang (2004Jiang ( , 2007 and Carneiro (2011) because their L2 learners did not display sensitivity to morphological omission; nonetheless, the authors had native speakers to contrast the L2 learners' results, which deserves comparison between L1 speakers and L2 learners in the future. Overall, L2 learners seem to lack an underlying representation of morphological knowledge since they cannot use it implicitly (CARNEIRO, 2011(CARNEIRO, , 2017JIANG, 2004JIANG, , 2007CLAHSEN, 2008), but they seem to perform well whenever they have time to monitor (KRASHEN, 2002(KRASHEN, , 2009 In addition, forthcoming studies using self-paced reading in the moving window should better control the characters and syllables in sentence fragments because we understand that participants can rely on their working memory to manipulate the presented information, and unbalanced conditions can impact the results.…”

Effects of salience and working memory on L2 processing of english relative clauses with past participles and past participial reduced relative clauses by L1 Thai learners

“…The L2 acquisition of English inflectional morphemes has been examined in relation to various variables, such as L2 proficiency (e.g., Rungrojsuwan, 2015;Carneiro, 2017;Kimppa et al, 2019), age-related differences (e.g., Jia & Fuse, 2007;Zhang & Widyastuti, 2010;Pfenninger, 2011), and L1 interference (e.g., Goldschneider & DeKeyser, 2001;Hawkins & Liszka, 2003;Murakami & Alexopoulou, 2016). Two factors which have been investigated with respect to the acquisition of the L2 English inflectional morphemes are working memory (WM)…”