Interaction between linguistic theory and language processing in SLA

Abstract

This article examines L2 performance in three areas of French morphosyntax by English L1 learners. More particularly, it examines how coindexation as defined within the government-binding framework develops in the L2 grammar. Empirical studies relating the development of two areas of French grammar by English L1 speakers are presented. L2 performance on information questions involving qui and que in which learners have to link the wh-phrase and its trace in order to establish the syntactic function of the wh-phrase in the sentence is examined, as well as performance on the morphological phenomenon of noun-adjective agreement in French where learners have to transmit agreement features from a noun to an adjective which it governs. In both cases, learners are found to increase gradually the structural domain in which they are able to operate as their level of competence in the L2 improves, suggesting that they are faced with a parsing problem when coindexing elements in a sentence. These findings are related to a study of the acquisition of restrictive relative clauses in French L2 by English learners (Hawkins, 1989), and then discussed in the light of the current debate in SLA research about the roles played by linguistic theory, on the one hand, and language processing mechanisms on the other.