Universal Grammar and Second Language Acquisition

White, Lydia

doi:10.1016/b978-012589042-7/50005-0

Cited by 43 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…Using a GJT and a Written Elicited Production Task to tap the learners' knowledge of grammatical wh-question formation in English, the researchers found that almost all the high-intermediate group and half of the low-intermediate group perform like the native English speaking control group; hence, the L1 is not the only source of the learners' UG-like knowledge. Rather, principles of UG remain accessible in adult L2 acquisition, and can be triggered properly by increasing the level of general proficiency (White, 1996).…”

Section: Empirical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Wh-Constraints In Interlanguage Grammar Of Persian EFL Learners and its Implication for Teaching English as a Foreign Language

Esfahani

2015

Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences

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In second language (L2) studies, one direction of research is to investigate whether adult L2 learners still have access to Universal Grammar (UG) .In the related vein, this study is an indirect assessment of availability of Wh-constraints in interlanguage grammar of Persian EFL learners through an on-line sentence-matching task. To do so, 60 university students, both male and female, majoring in EFL at Khorasgan university in Iran were chosen through an Oxford Placement Test (OPT) and divided into three proficiency groups(i.e. 20 Low Intermediate , 20 High Intermediate, and 20 Advanced groups). Moreover, 10 native English speakers were chosen as the control group in this study. Both English native speakers and Persian EFL learners performed an on-line sentence-matching task .The on-line test contained 40 pairs of English sentences, 20 matching grammatical pairs which observed the UG Wh-constraint and 20 matching ungrammatical pairs which violated this Principle. In sentencematching task students responded to two sentences on a computer screen indicating whether the two sentences were identical or not. The reaction time of EFL learners to both grammatical and ungrammatical pairs was measured and compared to that of English native speakers. The results revealed that native speakers of English can do the task faster than non-natives. Thus, Whconstraint is not accessible to second language learners to the same extent that it is to first language learners. This study furthers our understanding of the Persian EFL learners' performance in the area of L2 language acquisition. Moreover, the more proficient groups were faster than the less ones in sentence-matching task. As the proficiency increased, the results got much closer to the results of native speakers . Therefore, proficiency can be considered as a strong factor for UG activation.

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Section: Empirical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Wh-Constraints In Interlanguage Grammar Of Persian EFL Learners and its Implication for Teaching English as a Foreign Language

Esfahani

2015

Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences

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“…Ellis 1985;Klein 1986;Klein and Perdue 1993;Kowal and Swain 1997;Selinker and Lamendella 1978; Wong-Fillmore 2002) • age (passim the SLA literature) • lack of written input (e.g. Schmidt 1983;VanPatten 1988) • false automatization (Hulstijn 1989(Hulstijn , 2002a • end of sensitivity to language data (Schnitzer 1993) • lack of access to UG learning principles (White 1996) • learning inhibits learning 5 (Elman et al 1996) • language transfer (e.g. Han 2000;Jain 1974;Kellerman 1989;Major 2002;Selinker and Lakshmanan 1992).…”

Section: Putative Causal Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fossilization: five central issues

Han

2004

Int J App Linguistics

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Second language acquisition research over the past three decades has generated a wide spectrum of different interpretations of “fossilization”– a construct introduced by Selinker (1972) for characterizing lack of grammatical development in second language learning. These conceptual differences found in the literature, it has become increasingly clear, create confusion rather than offering clarification, thereby obstructing a coherent understanding of the theoretical notion as well as empirical research findings. This article addresses the conceptual differences by raising and discussing five central issues: (1) Is fossilization global or local? (2) Is L2 ultimate attainment isomorphic with fossilization? (3) Is fossilization a product or a process? (4) Is stabilization synonymous with fossilization? (5) Should empirical studies of fossilization span five years or more?

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“…This obtained result has, however, contradicted Bley-Vroman's belief that states that access to UG is only via the L1. Moreover, it has opposed the belief of those researchers who claim no access to UG at all such as Clahsen and Muysken (1986) (White, 1996).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nature of L2 Grammatical Proficiency: A Multi-Dimensional Approach

Lotfi¹,

Samani²

2011

IJEL

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This is a study with descriptive hypothesis-testing design investigating the true nature of L2 grammatical proficiency by focusing on its component parts. It examines the performance of 60 female EFL learners between 19 and 30 years of age at 2 levels of proficiency using 2 types of computerized Grammaticality Judgement tasks in different orders (i.e. Written Stimulus GJ task and Oral Stimulus GJ task) for each participant at a 1 week interval for 2 weeks per each task to determine the extent to which L2 learners' performance is affected by a few components of grammatical proficiency chosen and manipulated out of a great many that exist (i.e. written-oral dichotomy [viz. modality]) as well as language proficiency while focusing on Subjacency. Participants rendered GJ tasks on a 2-point interval. Results from analyzing the elicited measurement data indicated that the performance scores of the two proficiency groups in the two Grammaticality Judgement tasks did not differ significantly.

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Universal Grammar and Second Language Acquisition

Cited by 43 publications

References 40 publications

Wh-Constraints In Interlanguage Grammar Of Persian EFL Learners and its Implication for Teaching English as a Foreign Language

Wh-Constraints In Interlanguage Grammar Of Persian EFL Learners and its Implication for Teaching English as a Foreign Language

Fossilization: five central issues

Nature of L2 Grammatical Proficiency: A Multi-Dimensional Approach

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