Spoken and written production of inflectional morphology among L1 Mandarin speakers of English

Second language (L2) speakers frequently make errors when producing L2 inflectional morphology, but the underlying causes of remain unclear. We report three experiments investigating how such might arise within production system, focusing on whose L1 does not use morphology to indicate temporal properties events. Mandarin and English participants produced spoken (Experiments 1 2) written (Experiment 3) event descriptions in involving different contexts. In both production, participants’ present (3rd person singular -s) past (-ed) inflections was sensitive cues, error-prone, with higher omission rates for featurally complex inflections. These results suggest can acquire representations L1-absent features, do consistently activate these features their corresponding morphological forms during grammatical morphophonological encoding. Moreover, articulation cannot solely account all errors.