Variability of English past tense morphology by L1 Thai and L1 French learners

Abstract

This study examined variability of English past tense morphology by L1 Thai and L1 French learners. English, French and Thai are different in that past tense inflectional morphology is obligatory in English and French, but not in Thai. Based on the Failed Functional Features Hypothesis (FFFH) (Hawkins & Chan, 1997; Hawkins & Liszka, 2003), it was hypothesized that variability of English past tense morphology by L1 Thai learners was due to non-target-like syntactic representations, not the target-like syntactic representations according to the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis (MSIH) (Prévost & White, 2000; Lardiere, 2003). A cloze test and a grammaticality judgment test were administered to 30 L1 Thai and 30 L1 French advanced learners of English, and five native speakers of English.

The results showed that the L1 Thai learners’ incorrect suppliance rates of English past tense morphemes were significantly higher than those of the L1 French learners in both the cloze test and the grammaticality judgment test. Moreover, asymmetries in the L1 Thai learners' correct suppliance rates of English regular and irregular past tense morphemes were evidenced, whereas such asymmetries were not found among L1 French learners. It is assumed that the non-existence of past tense inflectional morphology in the Thai learners’ L1 led to variable English past tense morphemes as well as the asymmetries of regular and irregular past tense morphemes as L2 English pastness cannot be acquired by L1 Thai learners. The results, therefore, confirmed the FFFH, not the MSIH. Such asymmetries between the two verb types by L1 Thai learners were in line with Hawkins and Liszka’s (2003) explanation in that irregular past tense verb forms were retrieved as lexical items, whereas regular past tense verb forms were supplied according to the past tense rules. The asymmetries could also be accounted for by the dual mechanism model (Clahsen, 1999; Pinker, 1991; Pinker & Prince, 1991), which proposed that English simple past tense regular and irregular verbs are processed by different mechanisms. With respect to the theoretical and pedagogical contributions, the findings from the research have made significant contributions with respect to linguistic implications in second language acquisition as well as having pedagogical implications.