Transferred L1 Strategies and L2 Syntactic Structure in L2 Sentence Comprehension

Abstract

IN ITS RELATIVELY BRIEF HISTORY, second language acquisition (SLA) research has based its theoretical ground on principles derived from child language acquisition studies-which themselves are interdisciplinary, and heavily influenced by paradigms derived from linguistics and psychology.' Two predictable outcomes have thus occurred. First, the SLA research focus shifted whenever a promising new construct emerged in L1 theory. Assumptions regarding the role of the learner's L1 in L2 acquisition, for example, have changed dramatically in the last thirty years. Second, L2 acquisition processes were treated unidimensionally, as if they involved a single linguistic system. As a consequence, learners' L1 and L2 were conceptualized and analyzed separately without regard for the critical interactions which transpire between the two. Many researchers, in fact, have investigated the influence of L1 on L2 acquisition (e.g., 9; 10; 14; 15; 16; 18; 21; 37), while others have examined the effects of L2 structure on acquisition mechanisms (e.g., 11; 12; 13; 34). Relatively little attention, however, has been given to the ways in which learners' L1 knowledge and L1-based processing strategies are coalesced with the specific linguistic features and requirements of the target language. In an effort to minimize this gap, the present study explored the interplay between learners' L1 and L2 linguistic knowledge during L2 sentence processing. Cross-Linguistic Variance in Language Processing. During the last decade, interest has grown among linguists, psychologists, anthropologists, and educators in cross-linguistic variations in language processing. Child language studies, for example, demonstrate that children cannot make accurate responses to sentence forms which violate the perceived prototypical sentence patterns of their particular language (e.g., 3; 6; 20; 30; 38; 39). This finding would