Mental Representation of English Past Tense Morphology by Jordanian EFL Students: a Dual Mechanism Analysis

The study aims to examine if dual mechanism asymmetrical processing is applicable to L2 processing. A lexical elicitation task of the past tense is designed to measure the effect of phonological neighborhood similarity. The task includes a trio of non-verbs for existing regular and irregular verbs at three levels of phonological similarity which are the prototypical, intermediate, and distant. Forty high-proficiency Jordanian learners of EFL at the Hashemite University participated in this task. The results show that the dual mechanism asymmetrical processing is noticeable in the result of the study as the irregular past tense inflection is sensitive to phonological neighborhood similarity while the regular past tense inflection is not. The number of the irregular non-verbs being irregularly inflected decreases as the similarity decreases when moving from prototypical, to intermediate, to distant level.