Arabic learners’ acquisition of English past tense morphology

Abstract

The current study investigates the roles of lexical aspect and phonological saliency in second language acquisition of English past tense morphology. It also explores whether the effects of these factors are affected by data elicitation tasks and learners’ L2 proficiency. We created a learner corpus consisting of data from oral personal narratives from twenty Arabic EFL learners from two proficiency groups (low vs. intermediate/advanced), which were transcribed in CHAT format, tagged, and included in the TalkBank corpora. We also administered a written cloze task. Despite task variations, we find strong evidence that supported the influence of lexical semantics in Arabic learners’ acquisition of past tense marking, confirming the predictions of the Aspect Hypothesis.