Abstract：Abstract: Study-abroad context is an important factor in morphology processing. However, the effect of study-abroad context on the processing of temporal concepts’ expressions is still an open question. Therefore, The study compared form-function connections of English simple past tense expressions elicited from 76 different speakers (study-abroad Chinese students in England; Chinese domestic students; English L1 speakers) to address the effect of study-abroad context in input processing. Results show that (1) although study-abroad context is facilitative to a native-like inflectional morphological forms processing，the significant differences between the native and the non-native in their multi-functional connections indicate asynchronous developmental stages between the foreign language learners’ input processing and output in their expressions of temporality. (2) Lexical content words processing is insensitive to language learning contexts and L1 backgrounds. The study is attributive to a better understanding of input processing and its relationship with study-abroad context, which adds new evidence to the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis to some extent.
Key words: study-abroad context; input processing; English past tense expressions；learned attention
