Investigating bilinguals’ sensitivity to English regular past morphology: A self-paced reading experiment with Brazilian learners

ABSTRACT It is known that adult learners of English as an additional language (EAL) have difficulty in producing inflectional morphemes such as the third person present singular -s and regular past -ed. One possible explanation is that bilinguals are not sensitive to inflectional morphemes, in comprehension tasks as evidenced by longer latencies at critical positions in reaction time experiments, when compared to native controls. Having the above in mind, the objective of this paper is to investigate if in fact Brazilian EAL bilinguals are sensitive to regular past morphology in a self-paced reading task. Sentences varied on the use or absence of inflectional morphemes. The statistical analysis showed that EAL speakers are not sensitive to past morphology. The results are discussed in light of Distributed Morphology and of previous studies on production and processing of inflectional morphemes in EAL.