L2 Production of English Past Morphology in Advanced Spanish Natives: Syntactic Deficits or Phonotactic Transfer?

It is not uncommon to find that adult second language (L2) learners fail to produce inflectional morphology consistently well in obligatory contexts. One situation where this has been attested is simple past in L2 English, with a number of studies having focused on native speakers of Chinese learners of English (e.g. Hawkins & Liszka 2003; Lardiere 1998a, b, 2000, 2007; Goad, White & Steele 2003; Goad & White 2006). To date, there have been at least two proposals that seek to account for the observed and documented fact that native speakers of Chinese tend to miss simple past morphology. On the one hand, it has been argued that such missing inflection results from a syntactic representational deficit (Hawkins & Liszka 2003), a view akin to the so-called morphology-beforesyntax approach, whereby missing morphology is indicative of corresponding missing syntactic representation (White 2003). On the other hand, it has also been claimed that there is dissociation between formal syntactic features and their corresponding morpho-phonological forms, so that relatively poor morphological production in L2 learners is thought to be caused (at least in part) by some problem in the interface between syntax and morphophonology (e.g. Haznedar & Schwartz 1997, Lardiere 1998, 2000, 2007; Prevost & White 2000). In what follows, I will review some of the analyses put forward by these two approaches by including data from another group of L2 speakers of English. The reason for this is that, in a language like Chinese, there are at least two possible sources of linguistic transfer in the acquisition of English simple past tense. On the one hand, past tense is not grammaticalized in Chinese, i.e. the notion of past is encoded through adverbials and context rather than any functional morphology, and therefore syntactic transfer needs to be overcome. On the other hand, English simple past often involves complex codas, but in Chinese they are disallowed across the board. Therefore, since there are at least two possible sources of transfer, it will be hard for any analysis to tease them apart unquestionably. Then, in order to isolate these two possible sources of transfer, it becomes helpful to look at a group of language learners whose native language has only one of these two sources of transfer. Spanish constitutes such a language, since past tense is grammaticalized (like English) but at the same time, complex codas are disallowed (in a way similar to Chinese). Thus, if native speakers of Spanish learning English are shown to have problems with past morphology in the oral data in spite of target-like performance in other tasks, then such results will provide support for phonotactic transfer effects on functional morphology and consequently, indirect evidence against representational deficits accounts for native speakers of Chinese learners of English.

[1]  Jeffrey Steele,et al.  Missing Inflection in L2 Acquisition: Defective Syntax or L1-Constrained Prosodic Representations? , 2003 .

[2]  Donna Lardiere,et al.  Ultimate Attainment in Second Language Acquisition: A Case Study , 2006 .

[3]  Donna Lardiere,et al.  Dissociating syntax from morphology in a divergent L2 end-state grammar , 1998 .

[4]  Roger Hawkins,et al.  Interpretation of English multiple wh-questions by Japanese speakers: a missing uninterpretable feature account , 2006 .

[5]  John Archibald,et al.  Second language acquisition and linguistic theory , 2000 .

[6]  Lydia White,et al.  Missing Surface Inflection or Impairment in second language acquisition? Evidence from tense and agreement , 2000 .

[7]  Robert Bayley Variation theory and second language learning : linguistic and social constraints on interlanguage tense marking , 1992 .

[8]  I. Tsimpli Interrogatives in the Greek / English interlanguage: a minimalist account , 2003 .

[9]  Roumyana Slabakova,et al.  Meaning in the second language , 2008 .

[10]  Lydia White,et al.  Second Language Acquisition and Universal Grammar , 1990, Studies in Second Language Acquisition.

[11]  Ianthi Maria Tsimpli,et al.  The Interpretability Hypothesis: evidence from wh-interrogatives in second language acquisition , 2007 .

[12]  R. Hout,et al.  The Lexicon-Syntax Interface in Second Language Acquisition , 2003 .

[13]  Lydia White,et al.  Ultimate attainment in interlanguage grammars: a prosodic approach , 2006 .