| The study of language production by adults who are learning a second language (L2) has received a good deal of attention especially when it comes to omission of inflectional morphemes within L2 utterances. Several explanations have been proposed for these inflectional errors. One explanation is that the L2 learner simply does not have the L2 syntactic or prosodic representation in his grammar leading to omission of surface inflections (Hawkins & Liszka, 2003; Goad, White, & Steele, 2003, respectively). Others attribute L2 errors to mapping problems between the lexicon and syntax (Prevost & White, 2000; Lardiere, 1998, 2003). Another potential explanation for the variable production of inflectional endings is that it may be due to performance factors as in Hopp (2009) and Martohardjono, Valian, and Klein (2012) or to "Extra-syntactic" factors as proposed in Klein (2004) or to syllable repairs due to L1 phonotactic interference as proposed in Davidson (2005, 2006a, 2006b). This dissertation claims that when L2 morphosyntactic representations are shown to be available in the L2 learner's grammar, L2 inflectional variability can be attributed to L1 phonotactic interference, salience of the L2 inflection, and performance factors leading to systematic, but asymmetrical patterns of perception and production of the allomorphs that represent the surface L2 inflections. The results revealed that the target inflections were not omitted across the board as would be expected under deficit accounts. On the contrary, repairs of the final target coda clusters (i.e., schwa epenthesis before and after the final inflectional consonant and devoicing of the word-final consonants) revealed patterns that are consistent with the degree of syllabicity (e.g., [Vd] vs. [t] and [d]) and sonority (e.g., [s] vs. [t]) of the allomorph or coda and are not indicative of morphosyntactic deficits. Importantly, schwa epenthesis was applied asymmetrically (i.e., particularly to stops [t] and [d]) in clusters that contained target codas and inflectional allomorphs in real, nonce, and monomorphemic items, and thus, this repair pattern is contra the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis of Goad et al. (2003). Overall, this dissertation presents an alternative explanation for L2 inflectional errors outside of the morphosyntactic and prosodic deficit arguments. |
