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Past Tense Marking In English By Chinese Learners, Hsuehmei Liu Price

Master's Theses

Researchers in the field of both first and second language acquisition have been studying the mechanisms underlying the marking of past tense in English, and have identified verb saliency, grammatical aspect, and proficiency level as some of the factors influencing the process. This study tests these factors by comparing 60 Chinese English learners' correct marking of English past tense under various conditions using analysis of variance. I found that Chinese learners of English are more likely to mark irregular verbs and aspectual perfectives than regular verbs and aspectual imperfectives for past tense. However, proficiency level was not found to have …