Causes Of Adult ESL Learners' Insensitivity To Inflectional Morphemes

Adult ESL speakers'insensitivity to inflectional morphemes is one of the most popular focuses in the field of second language learning. However, the causes of this insensitivity are versatile such as critical period effect, L1 transfer, to name just a few. The most disputable ones are competence deficit and performance deficiency. Competence deficit holds that insensitivity lies at representation or competence level, but performance deficiency claims that insensitivity locates at processing or control level. Due to the disputation on the cause of inflectional morphological insensitivity, the purpose of this study is to clarify this problem and find out the real cause of such insensitivity. In order to investigate whether inflectional morphological insensitivity comes from competence deficit or performance deficiency, whether ESL learners'language competence is complete should be discussed. However, language competence is abstract and difficult to measure. Thus the present study discussed whether ESL learners acquired implicit knowledge based on the reason that the knowledge integrated into one's competence can be considered as implicit knowledge used by learners automatically or without attention resource.Researchers tended to apply two standards to judge whether ESL learners were sensitive to one specific inflectional morpheme:performance consistency and accuracy rates. The performance consistency was adopted in current study to check whether participants performed differently between two types of sentences (grammatical sentences and ungrammatical sentences). The significance of this study lies at the use of a different experimental paradigm. In order to determine the real causes of adult ESL learners' insensitivity to inflectional morphemes with reliability, this study adopted paradigm of receptive use of L2 to discuss whether ESL learners acquired implicit knowledge. This experimental paradigm, self-paced word-by-word reading task in particular, was obviously more reliable than paradigm of productive use of L2 because it excluded the possibility to use explicit knowledge for ESL speakers.Two groups of participants (Native speakers and Adult Chinese ESL speakers) were recruited to take part in the self-paced word-by-word tasks. And this research use 2×2 experimental method with sentence types (grammatical and ungrammatical) and subject types (native English speakers and Chinese adult ESL speakers) as independent variables and reading time on each word as dependent variable. Whether participants have acquired implicit knowledge in this study was determined by reading time on each word, especially the verb and words after the verb. Subject and item analysis were adopted to analyze the experimental data. The results showed that ESL speakers'knowledge about inflectional morphemes was not implicit knowledge. That is to say, their L2 competence was incomplete and their insensitivity to inflectional morphemes resulted from competence deficit.The findings implicated that the experimental paradigm adopted in current study could be used to measure the nature of ESL learners'linguistic knowledge (implicit knowledge or explicit knowledge). Moreover, the fact that ESL learners'insensitivity was located at the competence level urged researchers and educators to discuss what kind of knowledge can be integrated into their L2 competence and what the specific process of integrating is or what kind of knowledge cannot integrate and what the reason is. All these issues are worth investigating in order to obtain more spectacular achievements in the future in the field of second language research.