One possible direction for the puzzle of morphological acquisition in advanced second-language learners of English: Insights from Chinese and Japanese speakers

• 발행기관: 경희대학교 언어정보연구소
• 저자명: Satsuki Kojima
• 간행물 정보: 『언어연구』제42권 Special Edition, 75~107쪽, 전체 33쪽
• 주제분류: 인문학 > 언어학
• 파일형태: PDF
• 발행일자: 2025.09.30

국문 초록

Previous studies on secondlanguage English acquisition have underscored the difficulty of mastering inflectionalmorphology, such as the third-person singular -s. Two main perspectives have emergedwithin generative grammar frameworks to elucidate this difficulty, namely, the missingsurface inflection hypothesis and the failed functional feature hypothesis. However, thereis still no reasonable explanation for the various phenomena in different languages. Thisstudy examined speech data from advanced Japanese and Chinese learners of English,replicating previous studies. The past tense in Japanese is inflected, unlike the presenttense. In contrast, Chinese lacks inflection in both the past and present tenses. Theobjective of this study is to ascertain which of the aforementioned hypotheses providesa more robust explanation for the observed morphological variability. A series of clayanimations featuring Pingu was used as a methodology for speech production insteadof the classic competence questionnaires. The data were obtained from six Japaneseand eight Chinese learners who participated in this study. The findings revealed a significantdifference between the two groups in the narration task, but not in the other task. Overall,the Japanese learners produced more third-person singular -s and fewer morpheme errorsthan the Chinese learners. A notable finding in this study is the higher percentage ofcorrect answers obtained by Chinese learners of English in comparison to previous research. This study significantly advances our understanding of how the absence of specific syntacticfeatures in the L1 affects L2 acquisition.

목차

1. Introduction

2. Theoretical background

3. Research questions

4. Methodology

5. Results

6. Discussion

7. Future scope of the study

8. Conclusion

References

키워드

feature generative second language acquisition inflection first-language effect advanced learners