Morphological Markedness in Second Language Acquisition

Learning Agreement in the Noun Phrase: The Strategies of Three First-Year Spanish Students

“…Although there is considerable research on the role of markedness in acquisition, few investigators have studied the interaction of markedness and the learner strategies directly. Connors (1988), a notable exception, clearly indicates that default behavior is a function of both the linguistic properties of the sub-domain being acquired and learner variables. She studied adult German and French L2 to determine whether a learner's relative use of marked/ unmarked forms in NP and VP mo hology might serve äs an index of syntactic sophistication and, consequently, äs predictor of general success in acquisition.…”

Markedness and Learner Strategy: Form‐ and Meaning‐oriented Learners in the Foreign Language Context

“…One recent study (7) clearly indicates that default behavior (disposition to use the unmarked marked form) is a function of both the linguistic properties of the subdomain being acquired and learner variables. Connors studied German and French L2 to determine whether a learner's relative use of markedunmarked forms in noun phrase (NP) and verb phrase (VP) morphology might serve as an index of syntactic sophistication and presumably as a predictor of general success in acquisition.…”

“…6 Jeffs performance on tia vs. persona and mujer vs. gente indicates that he attends much more to real-world (semantic) gender than to arbitrary gender, even if the gender is signalled morphologically. 7 In short, when grappling with a learning problem, Jeff attended to meaning primarily. If, however, there was no evident meaning dimension, he made arbitrary morphological (masculine default) choices.…”