| In the literature on the representation of language there is a debate between two theories: the connectionist perspectives (“single systems”), and the symbolic perspectives (“the declarative/procedural model”). The debate, focused on the representation of English past tense morphology, has not been settled, mainly because both approaches have been able to accommodate the empirical data. Recent research has started investigating other domains, such as the representation of other languages, and of English as a second language (L2).; The thesis reports the results of four elicited production experiments that explore first (L1) and second language speakers' representation and processing of English inflection (past tense and plural), and L1 representation and processing of Spanish inflection (past imperfect and present tense). Ninety-eight adult participants (32 Chinese, 33 Spanish, and 33 English speakers) were asked to respond orally using an inflected word in sentence context. English L2 speakers were late learners (age of arrival in the US greater than 17, mean = 26). Accuracy and response times were the dependent variables analyzed. Frequency and neighborhood effects analyses were performed on the data to empirically distinguish the models under debate.; Three main findings are reported and discussed. First, a contrast between L1 and L2 speakers predicted by the declarative/procedural model was found in the English production data: while for L1 speakers, only irregular items exhibited psychological signs of memory storage, for L2 speakers these signs appeared for both regular and irregular items, suggesting that L2 speakers memorize regularly inflected forms. Second, a linear relationship was found between age of arrival and performance rates in the L2 speakers' data, indicating post-maturational age effects, contra the critical period hypothesis for L2 acquisition. Third, in the Spanish data, conjugational class was found to be the strongest predictor of speakers' behavior, indicating that classes play a relevant role in the organization of verbs in the mind. However, phonological shape (neighborhood) also showed significant effects, indicating an associative memory type of representation. The two conditions interacted in a specific way: the symbolic feature that marks conjugational class seems to work as a macro-organizer, inside which phonological similarity operates in mental representation. |
