Morphophonological Effects on Morphosyntactic Processing During L2 English Real-time Comprehension

While L1 influence on L2 morphosyntactic processing is widely-investigated, the role of morphophonology in L2 real-time comprehension is less understood (e.g., Frenck-Mestre et al., 2008). Specifically, it remains unclear whether L2 learners’ sensitivity to morphosyntactic violations (e.g., *last weekend the girl paint / chase the dogs) is affected by L2 allomorphic variations (e.g., paint-ed [tɪd] vs. chas-ed [st]) and L1 perceptual biases. This study explores morphophonological-morphosyntactic interactions in Mandarin learners of English, whose L1 lacks inflectional morphology and word-final consonant clusters.

57 intermediate-to-advanced adult L1-Mandarin learners of English and 57 L1-English monolinguals completed a semantically-driven self-paced listening (SPL) task involving tense / agreement morphosyntactic violations in English. We manipulated the morphophonological properties of the verb’s inflectional morpheme (past -ed vs. 3rd person -s): vowel epenthesis (chases, painted) and consonant cluster (chased, paints). Subsequently, using identical verbs and morphemes from SPL, participants identified if an inflected (A – chased) or uninflected verb (B – chase) matched the test verb (X – chased / chase) in an auditory ABX discrimination task.

In sum, our data showed that despite the absence of consonant clusters in Mandarin, L1-Mandarin participants unexpectedly showed greater sensitivity to L2 morphosyntactic violations involving verb-final consonant clusters in sentential contexts, but not when they perceived verbs in isolation. Our study is one of the few studies to offer evidence for morphophonological effects during morphosyntactic processing in L2 comprehension. Theoretical implications of these findings will be discussed.

Link to session