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Compounding and the Representation of L2 Inflectional Morphology
Author(s) -
Murphy Victoria A.
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
language learning
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.882
H-Index - 103
eISSN - 1467-9922
pISSN - 0023-8333
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9922.00114
Subject(s) - inflection , plural , psychology , linguistics , second language acquisition , associative property , representation (politics) , language acquisition , compounding , mechanism (biology) , morphology (biology) , first language , cognitive psychology , mathematics education , mathematics , medicine , philosophy , nursing , epistemology , politics , biology , political science , pure mathematics , law , genetics
Past research has indicated that L1 acquirers do not include regular plural [‐s] inflection within compounds, whereas they do include irregulars. This article reports on further work investigating this issue in L2 acquisition. One hundred adolescent francophone ESL students and 15 adult native‐speaker controls were required to generate novel compounds in English. The results indicated that although participants reliably included more irregular nounplurals in compounds than regulars, regular plurals were frequently found. The results are discussed in terms of whether both the dual‐mechanism and level‐ordering models are relevant in the domain of second language acquisition. The evidence does not unequivocally support either model; rather, the results may be best accounted for with a more associative model of language learning.