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Inflectional bound morphemes of English, such as third person singular -s , plurals, and past tense, are notoriously difficult for adult learners of English as a second language (ESL). Even very advanced ESL speakers who are otherwise considered highly proficient and effective users of the language often have difficulty in using these morphemes correctly in spontaneous communication. Such difficulty has been well documented in the second language acquisition (SLA) literature. First, a large number of studies have shown a low accuracy rate in the use of inflectional morphemes by adult ESL users in spontaneous communication across different first language (L1) backgrounds and different second language (L2) proficiency levels (e.g., Bailey, Madden, & Krashen, 1974; Ellis, 1988; Johnson & Newport, 1989; Krashen et al., 1977; Perkins & Larsen-Freeman, 1975; Shapira, 1978; Wei, 2000). With the exception of -ing , the accuracy rates for the use of inflectional morphemes in spontaneous speech are far from those of native speakers.
L2 learners' difficulty with inflectional morphemes can also be seen in their variable and inconsistent performance involving these morphemes. In Johnson, Shenkman, Newport, and Medin (1996), for example, native speakers and adult ESL learners were tested in an auditory grammaticality judgment test in two sessions separated by 3 weeks. More than 22% of adult ESL learners' responses were inconsistent between the two sessions, as compared to 2% by native speakers. That is, they often produced a yes response in one session, but a no response to the same sentence in the next session, or vice versa. Such inconsistency is quite common among ESL learners. It may occur between different test sessions such as in Johnson et al. (1996) and Perkins and Larsen-Freeman (1975), between different tasks (Ellis, 1987; Perkins & Larsen-Freeman, 1975; Rosansky, 1976; Salaberry, 2000), and even within the same sentence (Ellis, 1988).
Further evidence for morphological difficulty in L2 comes from longitudinal studies that examined ESL learners' English development over a period of time. These studies demonstrate that L2 learners' inflectional morphology tends to fossilize in spite of highly desirable learning environments. In two such studies, Long (1997) and Lardiere (1998) investigated English development of two ESL speakers over periods of 10 and 8.5 years, respectively. The two participants, native speakers of Japanese and...