Age Effects on the Process of L2 Acquisition? Evidence From the Acquisition of Negation and Finiteness in L2 German

Abstract

It is widely assumed that ultimate attainment in adult second language (L2) learners often differs quite radically from ultimate attainment in child L2 learners. This article addresses the question of whether learners at different ages also show qualitative differences in the process of L2 acquisition. Longitudinal production data from two untutored Russian beginners (ages 8 and 14) acquiring German under roughly similar conditions are compared to published results on the acquisition of German by adult immigrants. The study focuses on the acquisition of negation and finiteness as core domains of German sentence grammar. Adult learners have been shown to produce an early nonfinite learner variety in which utterance organization relies on principles of information structure rather than on target language grammar. They then go through a couple of intermediate steps in which, first, semantically empty verbs (auxiliaries) serve as isolated carriers of finiteness before lexical verbs become finite. Whereas the 14-year-old learner of this case study basically shows a developmental pattern similar to that of adults, the 8-year-old child produces a different order of acquisition: Not only is the development of finite morphology faster, but finite lexical verbs are acquired before auxiliary constructions (Perfekt). Results suggest a stronger tendency for young learners to incrementally assimilate input patterns without relying on analytic steps guided by principles of information organization to the same extent as older learners.

Light verbs and the acquisition of finiteness and negation in Dutch as a second language

“…Apart from studies that concentrate on the question of whether L2 learners have access to UG, a number of studies have appeared that look at the acquisition of finiteness and negation from a functional perspective (Becker 2005;Bernini 2003;Dimroth 2008;. The central idea in these studies is that negation bears scope and that it is scope relations that, together with the special semantic properties of light verbs, steer learners' acquisition of finiteness marking.…”

Judgments of information structure in L2 French: Nativelike performance and the Critical Period Hypothesis

“…The acquisition of information structure by adult L2 learners has previously been examined as it relates to the syntactic constructions employed by L2 learners in discourse and narrative (e.g., Carroll et al 2000). Some previous studies have used production data to examine the acquisition of finiteness in L2 learners of French (Schlyter 2003) and German (Dimroth et al 2003;Dimroth 2008); others have studied anaphora in narrative (Carroll and Lambert 2003), the production of topic markers (Ferdinand 2002), and the grammatical means used to organize information in learner varieties of German and English (Carroll & von Stutterheim 2003). While many existing studies have examined the assignment of information structure to sentences, fewer studies have looked at L2 learners' ability to identify and process anomalies in the information structure of a sentence, and those that have looked at this have targeted L2 learners' sensitivity to information structure distinctions communicated by word order (e.g., Wilson et al 2007 for German; Kaiser & Trueswell 2004 for Finnish).…”

Differences or fundamental differences?

“…Further research is needed to confirm to what extent this pattern is reliable. The present data suggest that cL2 learners show this target-like behaviour from the first occurrences of negated utterances onwards: the data collection for the studies of Haberzettl (2005) and Dimroth (2008) started almost immediately after the onset of acquisition and as such, captured the very first occurrences of verbs in learners' speech. The negated utterances included in the above table were thus the first negated utterances used by these children in verbal contexts during the recordings.…”

“…First, the acquisition of verbal morphology and verb placement has been intensively studied in both L1 and L2 acquisition (cf. Pierce 1989, Verrips & Weissenborn 1992Grondin & White 1996, Haznedar & Schwartz 1997, Dimroth 2008Meisel 1997, Lardiere 1998, Prévost & White 1999. This large amount of evidence should make it possible to decide whether L1 and aL2 are indeed fundamentally different in this domain and whether cL2 (AoA > 4) patterns with aL2 rather than L1.…”