Native-Arabic speakers' acquisition of English verb inflections

Abstract EN

This study is methodologically based on the psycholinguistic study of Berko (1958).

The aim was to discover what was acquired by adult native-Arabic speakers who were exposed to English verb inflections in public schools and at the college level, and to test their psychological productivity in applying inflectional morphological rules to new English verbs in writing and speaking.

A contrastive analysis between English and Arabic was included for verb inflections and for phonological consonant clusters with inflectional morphemes attached to English verbs.

On the basis of such analysis, hypotheses and their tests, and statistical analysis for tests' results were done.

It was found that the adult native-Arabic speakers had already acquired the rules of the written past tense morpheme -ed and the present progressive morpheme -ing.

However, they had not already acquired the rules of the ora] past tense morpheme and both oral and written third person singular present tense morpheme -so The study also found the difficult consonant sounds when rhey are attached to the past tense morpheme.The results of this study would be useful for both natives and non-natives Arabic speakers in the acquisition and teaching of English verb inflectional morphology.

Likewise, the results should be considered by language acquisition researchers, methodologists, and textbook-writers.