Omitting the -ed. The tendency of Native Spanish adult learners to mispronounce the English past tense morpheme

Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics grade: 13 Humboldt-University of Berlin (Anglistik und Amerikanistik) course: Language Acquisition language: English abstract: Native Spanish speakers tend to mispronounce or to omit the -ed morpheme when it comes to regular English verbs in simple past. (example: managed arranged crowded). It is important to remind oneself of the fact that [t]he basic morphological unit however is not the word but the morpheme [...] the smallest meaning-bearing unit of a language (Kortmann Bernd. English Linguistics: Essentials).So when the -ed morpheme is omitted the listener cannot discriminate whether the person speaking is talking in simple present or in simple past. This might lead to confusion and to serious misunderstandings. I personally found that native speakers of Spanish face serious problems when it comes to the pronunciation of English words.In all the months I spent in Spain I somehow thought about those difficulties that occur constantly and when giving English lessons to Spanish teenagers I finally came to the conclusion that I have to investigate at least one aspect of the phenomenon of the mispronunciation of English words by native speakers of Spanish.