Missing Inflection in L2 Acquisition: Defective Syntax or L1-Constrained Prosodic Representations?

Goad, Heather; White, Lydia; Steele, Jeffrey

doi:10.1353/cjl.2004.0027

Cited by 92 publications

(121 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…The successful production of overt subjects is replicated in other existing studies (Lardiere, 1998 a, b;Haznedar, 2001;Inonin and Wexler, 2002;White, 2003;Goad, White and Steele, 2003), regardless of the fact that the L2 learners' L1 33 permits null subjects.…”

Section: Subject Raising and Case Markingsupporting

confidence: 68%

Knowledge of syntax and verbal morphology in adolescent L2 English: A Feature Reassembly account

Muroya¹

2014

Kansas Working Papers in Linguistics

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This study investigates knowledge of both syntax and verbal morphology by L2 English classroom learners with L1 Japanese in affirmative sentences with VP-adverbs (e.g., She usually eats breakfast at nine 2 ). It proposes that the findings are consistent with the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere, 2008(Lardiere, , 2009) which the Full Transfer Full Access Hypothesis underlies 3 . Results are obtained from an elicited production task: for written data with 90 junior high school students (12-15 years old 4 ) and 30 university students (19-20 years old), as well as for spoken data with 12 junior high school students (12-13 years old). It is observed that the pattern of use of verb forms is different from that found in other L2English studies. The key differences are: (1) high omission of copula is in copula is+adverb contexts; (2) two kinds of commission error where tense/aspect forms replace each other. It is argued that such variability in verbal morphology could be accounted for by the differences in the processes and conditions by which relevant morphosyntactic and semantic features are assembled between L1 and L2, which is consistent with the key claim of the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis.

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Section: Subject Raising and Case Markingsupporting

confidence: 68%

Knowledge of syntax and verbal morphology in adolescent L2 English: A Feature Reassembly account

Muroya¹

2014

Kansas Working Papers in Linguistics

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“…After 10 years' residence in the United States, Patty's production of obligatory inflections for past tense -ed and third person singular -s was extremely deficient (34 % and 5 % production, respectively); 8 years later, there was no improvement. Similarly, Goad, White, and Steele (2003) reported low production of tense and agreement morphology in L1 Mandarin Chinese late learners' descriptions of pictures (length of residence in Canada = 6 months to 5 years).…”

Section: The Challenge Of Inflections For L1 Chinesementioning

confidence: 92%

“…High production (about 90 %) of be variants (is, was) and of related verbal forms (has, have) does in fact occur in the spoken and written English of L1 Chinese (Goad et al, 2003;Lardière, 1998aLardière, , 1998bLardière, , 2003Lardière, , 2006. On the basis of such findings, it has been proposed that late learners possess intact mental representations for tense and agreement, but may be unable to access these representations and/ or procedures for integrating inflections with syntactic features when resources for processing the L2 are stressed (Prévost & White, 2000;White, 2010; see also Hopp, 2010).…”

Section: The Challenge Of Inflections For L1 Chinesementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Goad et al (2003) reported native-like performance when their sample of inflection-deficient L2ers was tested for knowledge of tense and agreement morphology through grammaticality judgments rather than production. Similarly, L1-Mandarin late L2ers supplied past and perfective inflections 90 % of the time when producing sentences they had previously read under conditions directing attention to inflections (Goad & White, 2008).…”

Section: The Challenge Of Inflections For L1 Chinesementioning

confidence: 99%

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Late L2ers can acquire grammatical features that do not occur in their L1: Evidence from the effect of animacy on verb agreement in L1 Chinese

Lempert

2015

Mem Cogn

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Second language (L2) learners often have persistent difficulty with agreement between the number of the subject and the number of the verb. This study tested whether deviant L2 verb number agreement reflects maturational constraints on acquiring new grammatical features or resource limitations that impede access to the representations of L2 grammatical features. L1-Chinese undergraduate students at three age of arrival (AoA) levels were tested for online verb agreement accuracy by completing preambles in three animacy combinations: animate-inanimate [AI; e.g., The officer(s) from the station(s)], inanimate-animate [IA; e.g., The letters from the lawyer(s)], and inanimate-inanimate [II; e.g., The poster(s) from the museum(s)]. AI should be less costly to process than IA or II sequences, because animacy supports the subject in AI but competes with the subject for control of agreement in IA sequences, and is neutralized in II. Agreement accuracy was greater overall for AI than for IA or II, and although an AoArelated increase in erroneous agreement after plural subjects occurred for IA and II, there were no AoA effects for AI. Higher scores on memory tasks were associated with greater agreement accuracy, and the memory tasks significantly predicted variance in erroneous agreement when AoA was partialed out. The fact that even late learners can do verb agreement in the case of AI demonstrates that they can acquire new grammatical features. The greater difficulty with agreement in the case of IA or II than of AI, in conjunction with the results for the memory tasks, supports the resource limitation hypothesis.

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“…Control over the feature requires knowledge of both the irregular and regular forms, but systematic use of the irregular past (did, said, went) tends to occur before productive use of the regular past (Lee, 2001;Rohde, 1996). At least some of the difficulty derives from the lack of perceptual salience of the regular form of the simple past (Bell, Trofimovich, & Collins, in press;McDonald & Roussel, 2010; see also Bayley, 1996;Goad, White, & Steele, 2003;Wolfram, 1985). In addition, learners initially make much more frequent use of the simple past with the class of verbs known as telics (finished, made something), which are bounded events with inherent end points.…”

Section: Simple Past and Possessive Determiners (Pds) His/hermentioning

confidence: 99%

The Quantity and Quality of Language Practice in Typical Interactive Pair/Group Tasks

Collins¹,

White²

2015

TESL

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Missing Inflection in L2 Acquisition: Defective Syntax or L1-Constrained Prosodic Representations?

Cited by 92 publications

References 37 publications

Knowledge of syntax and verbal morphology in adolescent L2 English: A Feature Reassembly account

Knowledge of syntax and verbal morphology in adolescent L2 English: A Feature Reassembly account

Late L2ers can acquire grammatical features that do not occur in their L1: Evidence from the effect of animacy on verb agreement in L1 Chinese

The Quantity and Quality of Language Practice in Typical Interactive Pair/Group Tasks

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