Mass-count distinction in Chinese-English bilingual students

Bin Yin,Beth Ann O'Brien

doi:10.5334/gjgl.382

Abstract

There has been increased interest in examining the relationship between different linguistic modules in second language learners’ grammar system. One such interface concerns learners’ ability to map morphosyntax to target-like semantic interpretations, especially in cases where the first and second languages differ in morphosyntax-semantics mapping. We examined this issue by investigating Chinese-English bilingual adolescents’ knowledge regarding the semantic consequences of mass-count morphosyntax in English. 228 Chinese-English bilingual students from Singapore took part in a quantity judgment task. Following previous studies, we tested five noun conditions including count (e.g., shoe), substance mass (e.g., ketchup), object mass (e.g., furniture) and two conditions involving items that can occur flexibly in both mass and count contexts (e.g., string/strings). The last two conditions specifically probe learners’ ability to make use of morphosyntax in deriving semantics. The representation of quantity for objects/substance was manipulated for number or combined volume (e.g., two large shoes/portions of ketchup versus six tiny shoes/portions of ketchup). Participants were asked to make judgments on the quantity of items, in response to questions presented in a count and/or mass frame (Who has more shoes/ketchup/furniture/string/strings?). Results show that our bilingual participants were able to make appropriate semantic judgments of quantity in response to manipulation of morphosyntax. We compare our findings with previous research in first and second language contexts and discuss the differences in terms of the quantity and quality of input in shaping learners’ grammar system.

Highlights

An important question in the field of second language acquisition is whether learners can correctly derive the semantic consequences of morphosyntactic material (e.g., Slabakova 2008)
5 Results In keeping with previous research using the quantity judgment paradigm, results were calculated as the percent of responses that were based on number
A three-way, 3 by 2 by 2 mixed model ANOVA was conducted with noun type as a within-subjects factor, language dominance (English dominant or Chinese dominant/Balanced) as a between-subjects factor, and age (11 year olds or 14 year olds) as another between-subjects factor

Summary

Introduction

An important question in the field of second language acquisition is whether learners can correctly derive the semantic consequences of morphosyntactic material (e.g., Slabakova 2008). Existing evidence suggests that difficulties may arise when differences exist between the first language (L1) and second language (L2) in terms of morphosyntaxsemantics mapping (e.g., Gabriele 2009; McManus 2015). Such differences may include the manner in which meanings are marked in languages. The difficulty was attributed to the fact that while French marks aspect explicitly via morphemes, German marks aspect implicitly through discoursal and lexical means Even when both L1 and L2 mark meaning via morphosyntax, the different mapping relationship between form and meaning in L1 and L2 might pose challenges to learners, as shown in Gabriele’s (2009) study on the learning of progressive morphemes in English and Japanese. It has been argued that learning morphosyntax-semantics mappings is not

Methods

Results

Conclusion