Past tense in L2 acquisition

[Michael Ullman]

At 11:46 AM +0100 1/7/02, Jean Pierre Chevrot wrote:
>Dear all
>One of my students is interested in the learning of the past tense in
>English as second language (by French learners). One of her goals is to
>consider the effect of the school learning of the rule on the patterns of
>regularization. She has tried to get some references
>but she only managed to obtain the papers related to the acquisition of the
>past tense in English as first language.
>Please, do you know some references about the learning of past tense *in
>second language acquisition* ?
>Thanks for your help.
>Jean-Pierre Chevrot
>
>Jean-Pierre Chevrot, Université Stendhal-Grenoble 3, BP 25, 38 240
>Grenoble Cedex, France.


Claudia Brovetto, a graduate student in my lab, and I recently
examined regular and irregular past-tense and plural English
morphology (morpho-phonology) in late Spanish and Chinese learners of English.
We had hypothesized, and we found, that whereas L1 English
speakers would show past-tense frequency effects for irregular but not
regular forms, L2 English speakers would show frequency
effects for both past tense types.  We take these data as support
for the dual-system view that in L1 regular past-tense forms are real-time
rule-products and irregular past-tense representations are memory-retrieved,
whereas in L2 representations of both types of past-tenses
are memorized - because of a critical/sensitive-period related
difficulty at learning rules, forcing learners to rely on memorization.

Below are two references, one related to this study, and the other
a theory paper discussing the issues.
I would be happy to email them (as pdfs) to anyone who is interested.

Brovetto, C., & Ullman, M. T. (2001). First vs. second language: A differential reliance on grammatical computations and lexical memory, Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing (Vol. 14). Philadelphia, PA: CUNY Graduate School and University Center.

Ullman, M. T. (2001). The neural basis of lexicon and grammar in
first and second language:  The declarative/procedural model.
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 4(1), 105-122.

Best,

Michael Ullman

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Michael Ullman, PhD
Assistant Professor
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Department of Neuroscience
and Departments of Linguistics, Psychology and Neurology
Georgetown University

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