Morphological Congruency and the Acquisition of L2 Morphemes

Abstract

The present study examined the proposal that the presence of a similar morpheme in the learner's first and second languages (L2) facilitates morphological development in the L2. Advanced Russian and Japanese speakers of English as a second language performed a self-paced reading task in which they read English sentences word by word for comprehension. Russian participants showed a reliable sensitivity to plural errors, but Japanese participants did not. The findings supported the morphological congruency hypothesis. A theoretical proposal is put forward to explain how morphological congruency affects L2 morpheme acquisition. The findings and the proposal are relevant to the discussion of the critical period hypothesis, ultimate attainment in L2, and the characterization of L2 competence of steady-state adult L2 learners.The acquisition of grammatical morphemes by second-language (L2) learners has received a great deal of attention in SLA research, both as a research topic in its own right and as a means to investigate other SLA issues such as the aspectThe results of the study were presented at

Number Attraction Effects in Near-Native Spanish Sentence Comprehension

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Cross-linguistic differences affect late Chinese-English learners on-line processing of English tense and aspect

“…In other studies, however, late L2 learners were asked to process some syntactic features that had no equivalent in their native languages, and these studies reported non-native-like behaviours from late L2 learners (Chen et al, 2007;Ojima, Nakata, & Kakigi, 2005). Jiang (2011) raised the Morphological Congruency Hypothesis to examine the effect the crosslinguistic difference of a particular morpheme might have on late bilinguals' on-line processing of L2. They claimed that two languages are morphologically congruent when both grammaticalize and mark a meaning morphologically.…”

“…They hypothesized that only congruent grammatical morphemes (i.e., those morphemes that exist in both the L1 and the L2) can be automatically processed by high-proficiency L2 learners; incongruent morphemes are difficult to be on-line processed. Jiang (2007Jiang ( , 2011) used a self-paced reading paradigm to examine bilinguals' sensitivity to the violation of nouns' plurality and verb subcategorization in English. Their participants were late bilinguals (came to US in their 20s or at an older age), and were from different L1 backgrounds: Chinese (2007) and Russian and Japanese (2011).…”

The Generative Approach to Sla and Its Place in Modern Second Language Studies

“…Overtness of functional morphology plays a role in predictions about learner behavior, such, for example, that L2 overt morphology is easier to acquire when your native language has a similar affix. For instance, Jiang, Novokshanova, Masuda, and Wang (2011) showed that Russian learners of English, unlike Japanese learners, were reliably sensitive to English plural errors in an online task. The authors attributed this differential sensitivity to Russian having overt plural morphology while Japanese lacks such morphemes.…”