Explaining the “Natural Order of L2 Morpheme Acquisition” in English: A Meta‐analysis of Multiple Determinants

Abstract

This meta-analysis pools data from 25 years of research on the order of acquisition of English grammatical morphemes by students of English as a second language (ESL). Some researchers have posited a ''natural'' order of acquisition common to all ESL learners, but no single cause has been shown for this phenomenon. Our study investigated whether a combination of 5 determinants (perceptual salience, semantic complexity, morphophonological regularity, syntactic category, and frequency) accounts for the variance in acquisition order. Oral production data from 12 studies, together involving 924 participants, were pooled to obtain weighted accuracy scores for each of 6 grammatical functors. Results of a multiple-regression analysis showed that a large portion of the total variance in acquisition order was explained by the combination of the 5 determinants. Several of these determinants, it was argued, can be seen as part of a broad conceptualization of salience.

Grammaticality judgments in children: The role of age, working memory and phonological ability

“…For example, Brown (1973) posited that the order of English morpheme acquisition in production is determined by the semantic and syntactic complexity of the morphemes. More recently, Goldschneider & DeKeyser (2005) conducted a meta-analysis of studies on the order of morpheme acquisition in second-language learners of English. They found they could account for 71 percent of the variance in accuracy on morpheme production by a combination of five factors, including frequency, phonological salience, semantic complexity, morphophonological regularity and syntactic category.…”

The role of teacher’s corrective feedback in improving Iranian EFL learners’ writing accuracy over time: is learner’s mother tongue relevant?

“…The proponents of meaning-focused approaches claim that only when the learners are involved in decoding and encoding of the message in real communicative activities, the conditions for effective L2 acquisition are provided (Long, 1996;Prabhu, 1987). In fact, it is believed that the L2 learner's knowledge of grammar would improve when the class activities are orientated towards communication of meaning and the teacher's feedback basically addresses the content and the meaning of the learner's language rather than its grammatical structure (Cook, 1991;Dulay, Burt, & Krashen, 1982;Goldschneider & Dekeyser, 2001;Schwartz, 1993).…”

The English you need to know: Language ideology in a citizenship classroom

“…Perceptual salience is defined by Goldschneider and DeKeyser (2001) as the degree of ease or difficulty in detecting a particular structure in the flow of speech (p. 22). Goldschneider and DeKeyser include three factors in calculating perceptual salience of morphemes: the number of phones in the functor, syllabicity, and, following Laver (1994), sonority.…”

“…503-505) are more perceptually salient than those with lower degrees of sonority, 5 with stops being the least prominent and low vowels the most prominent. In this study, the scheme proposed by Goldschneider and DeKeyser (2001) served as a foundation for classifying the students' grammatical errors according to their potential perceptual salience and, therefore, the listener's potential ease of detecting them in the flow of speech.…”