Second language (L2) speakers frequently make errors when producing L2 inflectional morphology, but the underlying causes of errors remain unclear. We report three experiments investigating how such errors might arise within the language production system, focusing on L2 speakers whose L1 does not use inflectional morphology to indicate temporal properties of events. L1 Mandarin and L1 English participants produced spoken (Experiments 1 and 2) and written (Experiment 3) event descriptions in English involving different temporal contexts. In both spoken and written production, L1 Mandarin participants’ production of present (3rd person singular -s) and past (-ed) inflections was sensitive to L2 temporal cues, but error-prone, with higher omission rates for featurally complex inflections. These results suggest L2 speakers can acquire representations of L1-absent features, but do not consistently activate these features and their corresponding morphological forms during grammatical and morphophonological encoding. Moreover, articulation cannot solely account for all L2 inflectional errors.

讲第二语言（L2）的人在产生L2变形形态时经常犯错误，但是导致错误的根本原因仍然不清楚。我们报告了三个实验，研究了在语言产生系统中如何发生此类错误，重点是L2说话者的L1不使用屈折形态来表示事件的时间特性。母语为L1的普通话和英语为L1的参与者以英语进行了口头（实验1和2）和书面（实验3）事件描述，涉及了不同的时间背景。在口语和书面作品中，第一级普通话参与者的当前（第三人称单数-s）和过去（-ed）的作品）拐点对L2时间线索很敏感，但是容易出错，对于复杂的拐点，遗漏率更高。这些结果表明，L2说话者可以获取不存在L1的特征的表示，但是在语法和形态学编码过程中并不能始终如一地激活这些特征及其相应的形态学形式。而且，关节运动不能仅仅解决所有的L2屈曲误差。