Second Language Learners’ Acquisition Of English Past Morphology

As an important functional category tense in English poses great problems toChinese learners of English. Chinese learners often show variability and omission onthe production of English past morphology in past tense. This thesis explores on thislinguistic phenomenon and adopts a first language prosodic transfer view on the basisof phonology-morphology interface. By analyzing and comparing the prosodicstructure of English tense and Chinese aspect and their different prosodification, wefind that English adjunction and final consonant clusters are unavailable at Chinesephonological level, while these two factors are essential for acquiring Englishinflectional morphology.Therefore, under the guidance of the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis, we proposetwo hypotheses below and their validity are testified in the following experiment:Hypothesis One: Chinese learners show much higher rates of past tense markingfor written output than spoken one.Hypothesis Two: Chinese learners show higher rates of irregular past tensemarking than regular tense marking in spoken contexts.Ninety college students participate in this experiment. They are required to take aproficiency test, a written task and an oral task. According to their performance in theproficiency test, we divide them into three groups which represent three differentlevels of L2proficiency, namely low level, intermediate level and advanced level. Bythe statistical analysis of our experimental data, we find that the experimental result isin support of the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis and two hypotheses we propose. Itshows that:1) Subjects of all three groups show much higher suppliance rates of pasttense morphology in written task than oral one.2) For all these three groups, they show a relatively higher suppliance rate of irregular past morphology than that ofregular past morphology in the oral task.3) For high proficient learners in Group3,their suppliance difference between written task and oral task is less remarkable thanthat in low proficient Group1and intermediate proficient Group2.4) For highproficient learners in Group3, their suppliance difference between regular pastmorphology and irregular one is less significant than that in low proficient Group1and intermediate proficient Group2.