Not So Fast: A Discussion of L2 Morpheme Processing and Acquisition (original) (raw)

Keywords grammatical inflection; morpheme acquisition; rule-based learning; itembased learning; single versus dual mechanism; implicit and explicit processing; declarative and procedural memory; input frequency; saliency; usage-based; associative learning Learning inflectional morphology is a vexing problem for second language (L2) learners. Children acquiring their native language also experience some difficulty, which results in their committing overgeneralization errors. However, relatively quickly, children sort out the regulars from the irregulars and one allomorph from another. This is not the case for learners of L2s, at least not for older learners. Long after individuals have achieved a high level of proficiency in the L2, they are still plagued by uncertainty when it comes to grammatical inflections (Todeva, 2010), and their production in the L2 is still characterized by morphological omissions, commissions, and substitutions of one allomorph for another. Furthermore, there is great variability in learners' performanceeven volatility . Sometimes a particular morpheme is present in learners' production, sometimes it is absent. Indeed, it is L2 learners' struggle with learning inflectional morphology that has encouraged researchers to study what it takes to process morphology, with the premise that it is processing difficulty that makes its acquisition so elusive .