The interpretation of pronouns by Japanese Learners of English

Ito, Myoko

doi:10.1075/eurosla.3.05ito

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“…For instance, Ito (2003) investigated interpretations of pronouns in a variety of syntactic structures among Japanese high school EFL learners in Japan. However, the number of studies on L2 learners' bound variable readings is rather limited.…”

Section: Pronouns and Reflexives In L2 Englishmentioning

confidence: 99%

8. The modularity of grammar in L2 acquisition

Nakayama¹,

Yoshimura²

2015

Handbook of Japanese Psycholinguistics

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1 This chapter discusses L2 acquisition, in particular, adult foreign language acquisition, from a particular generative perspective. There are different views within the generative perspective and different theoretical approaches to investigating the mechanism of L2 acquisition (cf. Chomsky 2007a(cf. Chomsky , b, c, 2012Reinhart 2006). For instance, one could consider a set operation (including predication and hierarchy) and recursiveness as general cognitive primitives and our computational system constrained by (language) input, time, and working memory, which would generate language variations (e.g., word order, locality) and consider language to be learned by this computational system. This kind of cognitive nativism does not assume Universal Grammar (for different proposals, see WolfeFor other theoretical approaches, see Shirai's chapter in this volume).Brought to you by | Cambridge University Library Authenticated Download Date | 8/7/15 8:28 PM 2 Similarly in L2 Japanese, it's been shown in Nakahama (2011) that English-speaking learners of Japanese can use null pronouns, but intermediate learners use more lexical nouns (as well as overt pronouns) than those with higher proficiency. Even high proficiency speakers, however, use more full nouns in narratives than Japanese native speakers. 236Mineharu Nakayama and Noriko Yoshimura Brought to you by | Cambridge University Library Authenticated Download Date | 8/7/15 8:28 PM 3 L2 Japanese errors reported in Kanagy (1994) like yasui-nai-desu ('not cheap') and akai-zya-arimasen ('not red') are morphological or lexical misclassification errors (i.e., adjective vs. adjectival noun). Although the akai-nai ('not red'), akai-ku-nai, and aka-ku-nai sequence is observed in L1 Japanese and are morpho-syntactic errors (Sano 2002), this developmental sequence does not occur in L2, and the nature of error seems different in L1 and L2. L1 children are acquiring syntactic categories and their brains are maturing (e.g., the root infinitive stage; see Murasugi in this volume). However, adult L2 learners are both cognitively and linguistically mature and they have acquired one language already (i.e., the root infinitive stage doesn't exists in L2). Therefore, we regard these L2 errors as morphological or lexical errors. In other words, those errors in L1 and L2 may look the same, but their sources are different, and we are not certain if errors that solely fall in morpho-syntactic cases exist in L2 Japanese. 4 In order to explain their experimental results that Japanese-speaking learners of English were insensitive to the number feature, but sensitive to the person feature in subject-verb agreement, Wakabayashi (1997), Wakabayashi et al. (2007), and Shibuya and Wakabayashi (2008) consider Japanese not to have the number feature, but to have the person feature, and point out that subject-honorification is an instance of agreement in the person feature. See also Wakabayashi and Yamazaki (2006) and Shibuya, Wakabayashi and Yamazaki-Hasegawa (2009). Since it exists in L1, they wer...

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Section: Pronouns and Reflexives In L2 Englishmentioning

confidence: 99%