Effects of L1 Transfer Are Profound, Yet Native-Like Processing Strategy Is Attainable: Evidence From Advanced Learners' Production of Complex L2 Chinese Structures.

Yanan Sheng,Jun Lyu,Fuyun Wu

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.794500

Abstract

English as a verb-medial language has a short-before-long preference, whereas Korean and Japanese as verb-final languages show a long-before-short preference. In second language (L2) research, little is known regarding how L1 processing strategies affect the ultimate attainment of target structures. Existing work has shown that native speakers of Chinese strongly prefer to utter demonstrative-classifier (DCL) phrases first in subject-extracted relatives (DCL-SR-N) and DCLs second in object-extracted relatives (OR-DCL-N). But it remains unknown whether L2 learners with typologically different language backgrounds are able to acquire native-like strategies, and how they deviate from native speakers or even among themselves. Using a phrase-assembly task, we investigated advanced L2-Chinese learners whose L1s were English, Korean, and Japanese, because English lacks individual classifiers and has postnominal relative clause (RC), whereas Korean and Japanese have individual classifiers and prenominal RCs. Results showed that the English and Korean groups deviated from the native controls’ asymmetric pattern, but the Japanese group approximated native-like performance. Furthermore, compared to the English group, the Korean and Japanese groups favored the DCL-second configuration in SRs and ORs. No differences were found between the Korean and Japanese groups. Overall, our findings suggest that L1 processing strategies play an overarching role in L2 acquisition of asymmetric positioning of DCLs in Chinese RCs.

Highlights

To attain native-like performance, a second language (L2) learner needs to adopt new strategies in a target language while suppressing competition from her first language (L1)
3Here we focus on target-like relative clause (RC) responses reported in Table 2 of Xu (2013, p. 178), leaving aside 13 RCs with errors
Given that the L2-Chinese proficiency was high for the Japanese and Korean natives overall compared to English natives, to ensure each group had comparable target structures (i.e., Type 1 utterances) for inferential statistics, we further eliminated fourteen participants (Japanese: 5; Korean: 9) who produced no more than two instances of DCL-first or DCL-second configuration

Summary

Introduction

To attain native-like performance, a second language (L2) learner needs to adopt new strategies in a target language while suppressing competition from her first language (L1). This is a challenging task because languages differ in their syntactic and typological properties, and their processing strategies vary. A language with rich inflections utilizes verbal agreement In contrast, balanced and English-dominant bilinguals produced (Heilenman and McDonald, 1993), and Chinese as an isolating significantly less OSV sentences (only 6.8 and 3.3%, respectively), language with little morphology gives priority to animacy suggesting that they had a hard time switching from the L1 to the over SVO word order (Miao et al, 1986; Su, 2001). This study suggests that even though uttering a processing strategies of L1 are in conflict with those of a longer constituent first is arguably more cost-effective in forming target L2, linguistic transfer often occurs across the board long-distance (verb-argument) dependency in SOV languages (lexicon: Poulisse, 1999; De Groot and Keijzer, 2000; Jiang, 2002; (Hawkins, 2004, p. 108), bilinguals can still be heavily influenced

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