The production of inflectional /s/ by Arabic learners of English

The production of inflectional /s/ by Arabic learners of English

The present study investigated the production of two functional morphemes in the oral modalilty by Arabic learners of English (ALEs): the subject-verb agreement morpheme and the regular plural morpheme. These morphemes both have the phonological shape /s/. Four reasons for morpheme omission were investigated: prosodic transfer from the first language (L1); the distance between the controller and the target in an agreement relation; the animacy of the matrix subject in sentences containing relative clauses (RCs); and, in the same type of sentence, the semantic plausibility of the relationship between the matrix subject and the RC verb. The study consisted of four experiments, one per feature of interest, conducted with 41 ALEs using a self-paced sentence-completion task. Experiment One tested the predictions of the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis (PTH). The ALEs’ production of contrasting target types was elicited and analysed. The results confirmed the predictions of the PTH: the ALEs omitted morphemes due to differences between the prosodic representations found in the L1 and the L2. Experiment Two tested the effect of the distance between agreeing elements in quantifier phrases. The results confirmed that plural inflection was omitted more frequently in long-distance than in adjacent contexts, and in very-long distance than in long-distance contexts. Experiment Three was designed to test the effect of animacy on the production of subject-verb agreement on the matrix verb in sentences containing RCs. The results showed that the ALEs produced morphemes less frequently in inanimate- than animate-subject sentences, confirming an animacy effect. The last experiment tested the effect of plausibility on the production of subject-verb agreement on the matrix verb in sentences containing RCs. It was predicted that inflection would be supplied less accurately when there was an implausible semantic relationship between the matrix subject and the RC verb, than when this relationship was plausible. However, the results did not provide convincing evidence for an effect along these lines.

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