L2 Syntax of Long-Distance Wh-Movement in English

Abstract

This paper investigates Korean speakers’ knowledge of long-distance (LD) wh-movement in English to identify the role of the first language (L1) and second language (L2) proficiency in the acquisition of L2 syntax, which allows us to observe a developmental path in L2 syntax. To this end, the two current models of L2 grammar are considered: the Interpretability Hypothesis (IH; Tsimpli & Dimitrakopoulou, 2007) and the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (FRH; Ladiere, 2009). The results show that the advanced speakers, patterning with the native speakers of English, exhibited abstract grammatical knowledge of LD wh-movement in English. However, they demonstrated significantly slower response times than the native speakers of English in making judgement on all of the sentence types, regardless of their (un)acceptability. These findings suggest that L2 syntactic competence is deemed to be affected not by L2 speakers’ L1, but by performance factors associated with the syntactic constraint parser.