How to consistently and correctly orally produce verbal morphology, such as English regular past tense inflection, has been a big challenge and troublesome for FL learners. The research aims to explore EFL (English as a foreign language) learners’ developmental trajectory of the inflectional morphology (i.e., what mediating processes and strategies EFL learners use) to attain the native-like prosodic structure of the verbs with regular past tense –ed by comparing the differences among EFL learners at different English levels. This research adopted a self-repair analysis and Goad and White’s (2006) Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis with three developmental stages as a theoretical framework. Two experiments were conducted, grammatical tense test (Experiment 1) and read-aloud production (Experiment 2), and 30 participants (low-, middle-, and advanced EFL achievers) were recruited. The EFL learners’ self-repair data showed at least three interesting findings: (a) two strategies used by EFL English learners to produce verbs with -ed were to delete internal syllable and to divide a four-syllable verb (e.g., ‘graduated’) into two prosodic structures (e.g., ‘gradu’ and ‘ated’ or ‘gradua’ and ‘ted’); (b) true vowel epenthesis was found only in the low EFL achievers; and (c) fortition (native-like sound) was observed in the low and middle EFL achievers. These findings and self-repair data disclosed mediating processes between the developmental stages and provided insight on how Taiwan EFL learners attained the adjunction prosodic structures of regular past tense verbs in English.

Authors:
Hsiu-Ling Hsu, R.O.C. Naval Academy, Taiwan
En-Minh Lan, National Formosa University, Taiwan

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Posted by Clive Staples Lewis

Last updated: 2023-02-23 23:45:00

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