L2 irregular verb morphology: Exploring behavioral data from intermediate English learners of German as a foreign language using generalized mixed effects models
L2 irregular verb morphology: Exploring behavioral data from intermediate English learners of German as a foreign language using generalized mixed effects models

Summary/Abstract: This paper examines possible psycholinguistic mechanisms governing stem vowel changes of irregular verbs in intermediate English learners of Germanas a foreign language (GFL). In Experiment 1, nonce-infinitives embedded in an authentic fictional text had to be inflected for German preterite, thus testingpossible analogy-driven pattern associations. Experiment 2 explored the psycholinguistic reality of the so-called apophonic path by prompting two inflectionsfor one given nonce-word. Data were analyzed using generalizedmixed effects models accounting for within-subject as well as within-item variance. The results of Experiment 1 and 2 support the notion of a pattern associator and yield only scarce evidence for the psycholinguistic reality of a universal apophonic path. Therefore, the organization of irregular verb morphologyin the mental lexicon of intermediate GFL learners might best be captured by the linguistic notion of structured lexical entries as well as the psycholinguistic mechanism of an analogy-based pattern associator.

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