Fossilization in Inflectional Morphemes by Persian Learners of English

Abstract This paper provides a cross-sectional study of the fossilized endstate L2 English grammar of freshmen and junior university students of English. Results are presented from spontaneous production and grammaticality judgment tasks of two groups of the students, high-level (24) and low-level (19), concentrating on use of 3rd person simple present marker (-s), past tens marker (-ed) and pronominal case assignment. Data showed that despite low rate of suppliance of 3rd person simple present tense marker (-s) just in spontaneous task, studentsʹ suppliance of past tense marker (-ed) and pronominal case assignment is about perfect at both levels and tasks. Syntactic correlates (such as case assignment and presence of overt subject) were completely accurate, suggesting no underlying impairment to functional categories or features. There is some evidence from the L1, which has the person and number features of the subject marked by verbal agreement but usually lacks the third person singular in production task.