Prosodic transfer across constructions and domains in L2 inflectional morphology

Abstract

Second language (L2) learners are known to have difficulty producing inflection in obligatory contexts reliably. According to the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis (PTH), the prosodic organisation of L2 inflection is constrained by the inventory of representations available in the L1. At the same time, this hypothesis does not explicitly limit how freely prosodic representations can be transferred, so that transfer across constructions within the same domain (e.g., verbal domain: L1 tense → L2 agreement) and across domains (e.g., verbal domain: L1 tense → nominal domain: L2 plurals) are both possible in principle. The goal of this study was to determine if the current formulation of the PTH is valid, or must be reined in to exclude transfer across domains in particular. Forty-four Korean learners of English did a spoken sentence-construction task in which they had to produce subject-verb agreement and regular plural inflection. Bayesian hierarchical regression was used to analyse the results. By examining asymmetries in the suppliance of short- vs. long-stemmed inflection, we show that there are no grounds for attaching any stipulations to the PTH along the above lines, as prosodic representations are transferrable not only across constructions but also across domains.

Roles of domain-general auditory processing in spoken second-language vocabulary attainment in adulthood

“…Given that Goldschneider and DeKeyser (2001) presented a plausible hierarchical framework for the perceptual acuity and morphosyntactic learning, one promising enquiry concerns the extent to which L2 learners with different levels of auditory processing abilities master L2 morphosyntax with different levels of perceptual salience (e.g., sonority). There is a possibility that individual AUDITORY PROCESSING & VOCABULARY differences in auditory processing (a core component of phonology) may be integral to the acquisition of grammar which interfaces lexicon, morphology, and syntax (e.g., inflection; Austin, Chang, Kim, & Daly, 2021) and semantics and discourse (e.g., articles;Demuth & McCullough, 2009).…”

Pronoun interpretation in Italian

“…For the L2ers, stress showed effects potentially attributable to the L1, with a reduction in subject antecedents. In the context of the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis, which demonstrates transfer for word-and phrase-level prosody (e.g., Austin et al, 2022;Goad & White, 2019, 2024, our results point to the possibility that prosodic transfer is also found at the sentence level.…”