Processing L2 Tense: A Cross-Linguistic Investigation
Open Access
- Author:
- Gauthier, Jacqueline M.
- Area of Honors:
- French and Francophone Studies
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Arts
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Nuria Sagarra, Thesis Supervisor
Willa Zahava Silverman, Thesis Honors Advisor
Nuria Sagarra, Thesis Supervisor
Jean-Marc Authier, Faculty Reader - Keywords:
- lexical cues
morphological cues
temporal reference
second language acquisition
verbal inflections
working memory
inhibitory control
transfer
learned attention
blocking
cue salience
cue redundancy
cue reliability
overshadowing
learned attention - Abstract:
- Adults have persistent difficulty processing morphology in a second language (L2). The Associative-Cognitive Theory (Ellis, 2007) attributes this difficulty to linguistic characteristics (cue salience and reliability), language experience (cues previously learned in the L1 and the L2 affect later learned cues), and working memory limitations. To test this theory, adult native speakers of Romanian (morphologically rich language) and English (morphologically poor language) read sentences in L2 Spanish, which contained lexical (adverbs) and morphological (verb inflections) cues of temporal reference, and after judged the grammaticality of the sentences. There is mounting evidence to suggest that English native speakers rely on adverbs first to assign tense in morphologically rich L2s such as Romance languages, and verbal inflections later (Jiang et al., 2008, 2011; Lee, 2002; LaBrozzi, 2010; Leeser, 2004; Musumeci, 1989; Rossomondo, 2003; Sagarra & Ellis, 2010). Some theories (like the Shallow Structure Hypothesis; Clahsen & Felser, 2006) claim that there is a general tendency for beginning learners to focus on lexical cues, and other theories (usage-based models, such as the Associate-Cognitive Theory and the Unified Competition Model) attribute it to transfer. The results reveal that the English-Spanish learners relied more heavily on the adverbs, supporting the Associative-Cognitive Theory, and also show a general trend for the English and Romanian learners to rely more on the adverb at the beginning stages of acquisition.