Salience and Learned Attention: A Study on the Perception of Uninflected Verbs by Brazilian Portuguese-English Bilinguals

Abstract

The present study explores the potential reasons for L2 users’ difficulty with inflectional morphology. We investigated the effects of salience and learned attention on the processing of second language inflectional morphology by Brazilian Portuguese(BP)-English bilinguals. To analyze the effects of salience, we tested L2 users’ perception of past regular verbs and past irregular verbs ending with /?t/, which involves a more salient change in the verb root. To probe the influence of learned attention, we compared their behavior concerning regular past tense makers (–ed) and regular present tense markers (–s), as the latter occurs in a grammatical context in which Portuguese uses null morphemes. We conducted an Acceptability Judgment Task to observe L2 users’ behavior in relation to sentences that were ungrammatical due to the use of uninflected verbs. The results indicate that the participants were more sensitive to the absence of regular past tense than to the absence of regular present tense marking, but the absences of regular and irregular past tense markings were perceived similarly. The study's results corroborate models that account for the effects of cross-linguistic influence on learned attention to linguistic cues and also reverberate through second language teaching practices.