The acquisition of English past tense in an instructional setting

The development of past tense verbal morphology among second language learners has been associated with the lexical-semantics of verbal predicates, or the saliency and frequency of past tense morphology. The relative effect of the above-mentioned factors was analyzed in written and orally elicited narratives of 14 classroom learners of English (native speakers of Spanish in their home country). The results show that the effect of the cognitive saliency of frequent and irregular verbal morphology appears to be more important than the effect of lexical aspect in the beginning stages of development of inflectional endings. The results were analyzed from the perspective of two distinct cognitive processes in the development of inflectional endings in a second language: lexical (item) learning versus rule-based learning. The above-mentioned findings are discussed in terms of the potential value of developmental sequences for second language acquisition.