The acquisition of English irregular inflections by Yemeni L1 Arabic learners: A Universal Grammar approach

What it is about

The study follows 30 Yemeni Arabic-speaking undergraduates learning English, tested at two points of their degree (academic level 3 in 2023 and level 4 in 2024). The test has four parts: error identification and correction, plural forming, a sentence-building task with ten given verbs, and a paragraph of up to 150 words. Responses are coded as well-formed or ill-formed, and ill-formed ones as omission, addition, misselection, or left undone (the last is dropped). The authors read well-formed irregular forms as access to Universal Grammar and ill-formed ones as L1 transfer or overgeneralisation. At stage 1 there are 288 well-formed and 193 ill-formed occurrences of seven irregular types, of which 108 are additions. A one-way ANOVA shows a significant gain from stage 1 to stage 2. Consonant change, zero-morpheme, and the -a plural remain hard. The analysis is based on frequency counts and percentages, with no computational model.

Ideas

• I1. Error taxonomy for pupil answers: world/src/knowledge.rs exercises on irregular past forms can label each wrong answer as omission, addition, misselection, or wrong class, with a rule that says which. This is the explainable feedback the school student needs ("you added -ed to a strong verb").
• I2. Use the paper's seven irregular types (consonant change, vowel change, zero, suppletion, -a plural, -en plural, vowel plus consonant) as the class labels in en/src/morph.rs, so that a lookup failure reports its class.
• I3. Measure the "addition" error (overgeneralising -ed, such as "goed") on a fixed list of strong verbs: count how often en morph inflects a strong verb with -ed, and report it per class. The paper's 108 additions are the pattern to look for.
• I4. Negative control: score a set of answers with the errors inserted at random and check that the classifier does not invent a class; a classifier that labels correct answers as errors must fail the test.

For Mova

The chapter is 14. Irregular verbs, with 13. Verbs for the regular -ed rule. The code is world/src/knowledge.rs (exercises and tests for the school student) and en/src/morph.rs. The measure: label accuracy of the error classifier on a hand-checked answer set, run twice to confirm identical output. The study's data are small and its licence is share-alike, so use only the taxonomy and the design; do not copy its tables.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. arXiv 2602.13816

@misc{alsawsh2026acquisition,
  title = {{The acquisition of English irregular inflections by Yemeni L1 Arabic learners: A Universal Grammar approach}},
  author = {Alsawsh, Muneef Y. and Shormani, Mohammed Q.},
  year = {2026},
  eprint = {2602.13816},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13816}
}

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