A Study of English L2 Users Processing Inflectional Morphemes andtheir Working Memory Capacity

Abstract

Inflectional morphology poses many challenges for second language (L2) learners of English, as these individuals face problems in processing. Some researchers, such as Jiang (2004b, 2007) and Carneiro (2011), have investigated how L2 English learners process inflectional morphology. They have found evidence showing that L2 learners were not sensitive to violations of inflectional morphemes. In addition, McDonald (2006) claims that L2 processing dificulty is related to some factors among which working memory capacity plays a significant role. Based on that, this study aims to investigate if working memory capacity influences English L2 learners processing ability of the English inflectional morphemes: third person singular (s) agreement, and past regular verbs (ed). In order to do so, participants were expected to conduct three experiments in person and a proficiency test online. First, two off-line experiments in the format of acceptability judgment tasks, one with a time constraint and another with a memory load both containing grammatical and ungrammatical sentences , and a 2-back task, in which similar letters had to be selected from a list, were carried out byparticipants. The software PsychoPy was used to present the stimuli, and record the reaction time and performance of participants. Proficiency was measured with the Vocabulary Levels Test (VLT). Participants comprised a group of Brazilians native speakers of Portuguese and English as an L2 that were divided into high and low proficiency. In the acceptabilityjudgment tasks, the reaction time and score ranking of the high proficient group were compared concerning their performance on grammatical and ungrammatical sentences and the same was done for the low proficient group. The reaction time and performance of high proficient participants were compared to the low proficient participants in the 2-back task. Inwhat concerns the acceptability judgment tasks, the results indicate that the time constraint and working memory load did not offer an onus to processing of the inflectional morphemes under investigation. This suggests that working memory does not influence morphologicalprocessing. Moreover, when the performance of the high and low proficient participants was compared in the 2-back task, there was no statistical significance, which indicates that level of proficiency does not affect working memory capacity. The results obtained are discussedunder the Relational Morphology proposed by Jackendoff & Audring (2016).