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Morphological insensitivity in second language processing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2004

NAN JIANG
NAN JIANG
Affiliation:
Georgia State University
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Abstract

Two competing explanations exist regarding the nature of morphological difficulty in adult second language acquisition: competence deficit versus performance deficiency. This study tested these explanations by examining English as a second language (ESL) learners' morphological performance in reading comprehension tasks. Chinese ESL speakers were asked to read English sentences for comprehension in three self-paced word by word reading experiments. Their reading times were measured to determine if they were sensitive to idiosyncrasies/disagreement in sentences that do and do not involve the number morpheme. The results show that they are not sensitive to number disagreement, but sensitive to other idiosyncrasies tested. This insensitivity to the number morpheme suggests that their morphological knowledge is not an integrated part of their automatic second language competence.

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Articles
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Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 25 , Issue 4 , October 2004 , pp. 603 - 634
Copyright
© 2004 Cambridge University Press

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