The relationship of verb morphology to second language reading comprehension and input processing

The purpose of the present study was to determine the effects of varying the morphological characteristics of input on comprehension and input processing. The input varied as follows. The text used in this study contained nine, targeted subjunctive verbs. These verbs were substituted in other versions of the passage with infinitives and with a nonsense morpheme. Results revealed that passage comprehension, as measured by recall, was significantly lower for the correct, subjunctive forms than for the infinitives and nonsense forms. Input processing, as measured by a word recognition task, was not affected by verb form. No significant correlations were found between comprehension and input processing scores.