Acquisition of English Inflectional Phonology by Persian EFL Learners

The recent study was carried out to investigate the acquisition of inflectional morphemes s-plural and singular and ed-past tense marker among Persian L2 learners and to explore whether or not the absence of some certain phonetic features in L1 required in L2 will impact the acquisition and production of these markers and it also tends to explore the ability of Persian subjects in production and acquisition of final consonant clusters in English in the light of the hypothesis that the acquisition and production of these inflections would be difficult even if learners enjoy a pleasant proficiency level. To fulfill the purpose of this study, 50 subjects, Upper Intermediate and Advanced, of Safir Language Academy were chosen through administering the Oxford Quick Placement Test. The subjects were assigned production tasks (movie and nonsense word prosodification) plus reception task (nonsense word recognition) and their performances on each task were recorded and analyzed and the means of their performances were calculated. The analysis of the data was done through the between group – within group repeated measure analysis of variance (ANOVA). Consequently, it was concluded that subjects suffered inability in production of /t/ and they mistakenly confused it with /d/, and in the case of consonant clusters they had to aspirate, epenthesize or laboriously produce the consonant cluster in final coda position. It was also concluded that it was the phonetic awareness that facilitate the production and acquisition of these morphemes not the proficiency level of the individuals.

Keywords: Inflectional Phonology, Inflectional Morphemes, Phonetic Features, Production, Acquisition, Consonant Cluster.