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To examine morphological processing of past tense in English, we set up an ERP-based experiment where the participants read stem forms of regular and irregular verbs presented by using the repetition priming paradigm: the stem forms were either preceded by their past tense forms (primed condition: walked-walk, hold-held) or by their past tense forms of unrelated verbs (unprimed condition: stayed-walk, taught-held). The difference in ERP responses between the primed and unprimed stems was taken as showing morphological priming effects. In the previous studies (e.g., Münte et al. (1999)), native speakers of English elicited the reduced N400 in regular verbs, but not in irregular verbs. However, this study found an N400 reduction in the primed condition in both regular and irregular verbs. The reduced N400 effects were also manifested in control conditions: phonological words and the regular nonce verbs. These effects show that Korean L2 learners process regular and irregular forms in an identical way, whereas native speakers processed regular and irregular forms using a dual route reported in the previous studies. To conclude, Korean L2 learners do not process morphologically as native speakers do. There are some factors that affect L2 processing. First, L1 speakers use grammatical (=morphological/syntactic) information in language processing, but L2 learners do not. According to Clahsen and Felser (2006), L2 learners' grammatical processing capacity is limited. Second, L1 is acquired implicitly by children, but L2 is learned explicitly in formal classrooms. Finally, with maturational changes, late L2 learners use a declarative memory system rather than a procedure memory system in L2 grammatical processing.
