Abstract
Articles pose a particular challenge to second-language learners whose first language does not have them. Variability in article production in these learners is often explained in terms of first-language influence, but there are also suggestions that frequency-biased regularities in the target language itself might play a role. While most second-language research on articles has focused on English, a language with a relatively simple article system, the present study explores first-language influence and input-frequency effects by focusing on Swedish. Swedish expresses definiteness using a complex noun-phrase structure including several free-standing and bound morphemes, some relatively frequent in input, others less frequent. An oral-production task elicited adjectivally modified and non-modified noun phrases in indefinite and definite contexts from 23 foreign-language learners of Swedish who were native speakers of Russian, an inflectional language without articles. The analysis revealed that the learners were more likely to supply high-frequency morphemes than low-frequency ones. Furthermore, while the learners were equally likely to supply bound and free-standing morphemes, only their suppliance of free-standing morphemes was negatively affected by adjectival modification; their suppliance of bound morphemes was not. While the role of cross-linguistic influence should not be neglected, these findings suggest that probabilistic regularities in the linguistic input are a key factor in second-language acquisition of functional morphology.
Highlights
A major question in the field of second language acquisition is to what extent interlanguage variability stems from, on the one hand, first-language (L1) influence and, on the other hand, the nature of the second language (L2) itself
While the majority of data that lies at heart of different explanations comes from research on L2 English, a language with a relatively simple article system, the present study investigates variability in L2 Swedish, a language that encodes definiteness using a more complex noun phrase (NP) structure
When an L2 learner of English with an article-less L1 intends to refer to a count singular referent, the bare-noun structure must be suppressed for the L2 structure (ART + N) to be selected
Summary
A major question in the field of second language acquisition is to what extent interlanguage variability stems from, on the one hand, first-language (L1) influence and, on the other hand, the nature of the second language (L2) itself. When it comes to L2 acquisition of articles, patterns of omission have often been accounted for in terms of L1 influence but rarely in terms of input frequency (Ogawa, 2015). This is probably because “articles are the most frequent forms that are available to learners in input” When an L2 learner of English with an article-less L1 intends to refer to a count singular referent, the bare-noun structure must be suppressed for the L2 structure (ART + N) to be selected This inhibition requires attentional resources, which are limited. Since adjectivally modified NPs require more attentional recourses than non-modified ones (because they encode more pieces of information), fewer resources are left for inhibiting selection of the L1 structure, increasing the likelihood that the article is dropped
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