ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the low rate of past-tense marking. It presents a more detailed breakdown of Patty's past-tense marking by verb type, introduces additional data from written (e-mail) samples, and discusses various factors that have been argued in the second language acquisition literature to play a role in the production and distribution of past-tense marking. In addition to the various methodological concerns, people can add another interesting and important one that emerges in rather striking fashion from the aspect data. It is important to point out that the Aspect Hypothesis was formulated as a developmental hypothesis about emerging verbal tense morphology for learners in early stages of acquisition. The Declarative/Procedural model is a revised descendant of the Dual-Mechanism model of Pinker and Prince, which posits two distinct systems for the learning and processing of language. There is a very large literature on the role of first language (L1) transfer in the second language acquisition of phonology.
