Ultimate attainment in interlanguage grammars: a prosodic approach

Abstract

The ultimate attainment of L2 learners varies considerably; some learners achieve completely native-like performance -and arguably native-like competence-while others 'fossilize', their endstate competence and performance differing, often considerably, from native speakers of the L2. In this paper, we contrast two positions which argue that failure to achieve native-like competence reflects effects of L1 representations on the interlanguage grammar (ILG). These accounts differ as to whether non-native attainment reflects L1 syntactic or phonological properties. According to the Representational Deficit Hypothesis (is no (syntactic) parameter resetting in adult L2; consequently, speakers can never acquire functional categories or features that are required by the L2 but absent in the L1. In other words, there are permanent effects of L1 syntactic representations on the ILG. In contrast, we argue that it is transfer of L1 prosodic constraints that affects IL representations, with consequences for the production of inflectional morphology and function words, particularly during the course of development but also in the endstate. In this paper, we investigate the L2 acquisition of English tense morphology by Mandarin speakers; we show that Mandarin speakers have few problems in interpreting English tense appropriately and that their production of the morphology shows effects of stimulus type which is unexpected on syntactic accounts. We further argue that, while there are circumstances in which L2 speakers are able to adapt L1 prosodic structures in order to represent L2 functional morphology, there are certain situations where this will never be possible. II Representational Deficit HypothesisAccording to the RDH, the only uninterpretable formal features that can be realized in the ILG are those that are represented in the L1. In the case of the feature [±past], the lack of overt tense morphology in Mandarin is taken to indicate a lack of the corresponding formal feature in that language. The prediction, therefore, is that Mandarin-speaking learners of English are unable to acquire [±past], leading to difficulties in realizing and interpreting tense morphology. The IL representation, then, is permanently defective in the sense that it lacks features required to appropriately represent the L2.Investigating this hypothesis, Hawkins and Liszka (2003) report that, in oral production tasks, two Chinese-speaking subjects had greater difficulty realizing English t/d in regular past tense contexts (63% suppliance) than in the case of past participles (100% suppliance). Contra Lardiere (1998Lardiere ( , 2003, they argue that the problem with tense cannot be attributed to a difficulty with final consonant clusters: although many inflected forms ends in clusters, the same subjects * We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for comments and the audiences at BUCLD 29, GALANA 1 and the University of Hamburg for questions related to this work. We would also like to thank the following research assistants for their participat...

Prosodic structure and the representation of L2 functional morphology: A nativist approach

“…We have argued elsewhere that adjunction to the PWd is not available at the right edge in Mandarin, the L1 under consideration (Goad and White, 2006a;; transfer of the L1 representation will thus not help the learner to acquire the appropriate prosodifications for English past tense. Unless PWd adjunction is given by UG as the unmarked representation for inflection, positive evidence for this structure -the presence of an extra consonant which is not permitted at the right edge of single PWds -will only be available for the long-stemmed regulars and there will be no phonological (prosodic) explanation for shortening in the case of pseudoinflected irregulars.…”

“…In Goad and White (2006a), we propose that the differential treatment of regulars and pseudo-inflected irregulars in L2 outputs stems from the differences in higher prosodic structure shown in (3) and (4), coupled with conditions on the occurrence of syllables with featurally impoverished nuclei, specifically, the Empty Category Principle (ECP). The ECP regulates the distribution of empty-headed syllables in Government Phonology.…”

“…This, we have argued, indicates that it is not a phonetic strategy that L2 speakers employ to realize articulatorily difficult strings of obstruents but, rather, reflects a particular syllabification of the inflectional consonant: this consonant is a word-final onset whose featural content has spread into the following empty nucleus ('Onset-Nuclear (ON) sharing'); see (3a) and (3b), the IL representations of short-stemmed regulars like wrapped. In the target grammar, on the other hand, the inflection is syllabified as the onset of an empty-headed syllable (see (3c)) and is thus not realized with fortis release (see Goad and White, 2006a for details). In both the target (3c) and IL (3a, b) representations, the nuclei of the syllables containing the inflectional affix are 'featurally impoverished': in (3a, b), the nucleus has acquired its segmental content from the preceding onset and so contains no vocalic features, unlike ordinary nuclei; in (3c), the nucleus is featurally empty.…”

“…In this section, we review a study designed to systematically examine the effects of stem shape and the regular-irregular contrast on acquisition (see Goad and White, 2006a, for details), considering the results from the point of view of emergentism versus nativism. The study involved intermediate-level Mandarin-speaking learners of English who undertook a combined sentence completion and elicited production task, which examined performance on past tense and participial morphology, contrasting regular and irregular (pseudo-inflected) forms.…”

The Acquisition of English be Auxiliary and Thematic Verb Constructions by Adult Arab ESL Learners

“…The underlying syntactic representations are thus correct; however, the resulting surface functional morphology is not target-like due to problems in mapping the correct morphology onto the feature representation in syntax. The frequently observed variability in the production of certain inflectional morphemes has motivated Prévost and White (2000) to argue that this could be a reflection of a production-specific mapping problem rather than a deficit in the syntactic representation competence, possibly due to prosodic constraints operative in the L2 learners' L1 (Goad and White, 2006). The representations of the inflectional morphology may be fully specified in the L2 grammar, yet the production of the corresponding overt forms seems to be problematic for the L2 learners due to performance limitations resulting from communication pressure (Prévost and White, 2000: 129).…”