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L2 LEARNERS’ ADAPTATION TO AN L2 STRUCTURE THAT IS DIFFERENT FROM L1

PRIMING OF AN ENGLISH CAUSATIVE STRUCTURE IN KOREAN LEARNERS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2021

Heeju Hwang Open the ORCID record for Heeju Hwang [Opens in a new window]
Heeju Hwang*
Affiliation:
The University of Hong Kong
*
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Heeju Hwang, Department of Linguistics, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong. E-mail: heejuhwang@gmail.com
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Abstract

The present study investigates how L2 learners adapt their production preferences following immediate and cumulative experience with a syntactic structure when an L2 structure differs from an L1 structure in terms of verb subcategorization frame and argument structure. Korean learners of English described causative events in English in a picture-matching game. The meaning of a causative sentence in English (e.g., Jen had her computer fixed) is expressed with an active transitive sentence in Korean (e.g., Jen-NOM computer-ACC fixed). The results demonstrated that both immediate and cumulative experience with a causative structure increased the likelihood of producing grammatical causative descriptions (e.g., Jen had her computer fixed), while decreasing the production of ungrammatical active transitive descriptions (e.g., Jen fixed her computer). The findings provide novel evidence that an implicit learning mechanism is involved in L2 learners’ processing and learning of an L2 structure that is different from L1.

Type
Research Report
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 44 , Issue 4 , September 2022 , pp. 1181 - 1193
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Lok Ting Chan, Yuk Yue Fiona Cheng, Sheung Yee Lam, Chun Yin Liu, Sze Nga Ong, and Tan Ting Grace Tang for their assistance with data collection and coding.

References

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