A Study Of The Mental Representation Of Regular And Irregular Forms In Second Language

Our use of language mainly depends upon two capacities: a mental lexicon and a mental grammar. The former provides us with the words for communication and the latter provides us with the rules that underlie the sequential and hierarchical composition of lexical forms into predictably structured larger units like phrases and sentences. These two systems are comparable to irregular forms and regular forms of the human languages. Thus, investigation of the regular and irregular forms could shed lights on the mental representation and processing of the human languages, which has been one of the focal areas in psycholinguistics, neuroscience and language acquisition research in recent 30 years or so. So far, the research on regular and irregular forms has concentrated on the past-tense forms of English verbs. Two camps of the single-mechanism theories and dual-mechanism theories have come into being. However, almost all the previous studies examine the native languages. On the other hand, Pinker (1999) claims that the systems of mental representation and processing in humans are linguistically universal. Under such circumstances, the present study extends the research on the representation and processing of regular and irregular forms to second language and investigates their frequency effect and similarity effect, the performance on regular and irregular forms as well as the past-tense forms of doublet verbs by the L2ers in different acquisitional stages. The experimental results show that both frequency and similarity effects are found on irregular, but not regular forms. When the retrieval of irregular forms from the memory breaks down, L2ers will provide suffixed forms and overregularization appears. L2ers with a longer period of exposure to English perform much better on the past-tense forms of irregular, but not regular verbs. And some L2ers provide suffixed past-tense forms, others supply irregular forms and a few use both for doublet verbs. All these findings are in line with the predictions of the dual-mechanism theories which hold that the human...