Acquisition of English verb transitivity by native speakers of Japanese
Item
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Title
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Acquisition of English verb transitivity by native speakers of Japanese
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:d8b2efee64a9:11374
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identifier
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11755
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Creator
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Nagano, Tomonori,
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Contributor
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Martin Chodorow
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Date
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2012
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Linguistics | English as a second language | Causativity | Japanese | Learnability | Second Language Acquisition
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Abstract
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This study is concerned with the acquisition of English verb transitivity by native speakers of Japanese. Both a verb's semantic class (Levin, 1993; Pinker, 1989) and its frequency (Ambridge et al., 2008) have been proposed to influence the acquisition of verbs in L1. For example, verbs whose meaning entails change-of-location or change-of-state (e.g., move, roll, bounce, melt) typically participate in the causative alternation in English. In addition, among those verbs, it is predicted that high-frequency verbs such as break and move are acquired earlier than low-frequency ones such as shatter and slide. In SLA, a learnability problem is expected when the usage in L1 constitutes a superset of the usage in L2 (Inagaki, 2001; Montrul, 2001). Such asymmetric relationships exist between English and Japanese when there are idiosyncratic exceptions in a verb semantic class in one language but not the other. For example, inherently-directed motion verbs (e.g., descend, oriru/ orosu "descendINTRANSITIVE/TRANSITIVE") and verbs of disappearance (e.g., disappear, kieru/ kesu "disappearINTRANSITIVE/TRANSITIVE") are prohibited in the causative alternation in English, but not in Japanese. Thus, a learnability problem in the causative alternation is expected for Japanese ESL leaners. Twenty-six native English speakers and 35 Japanese ESL learners participated in this computer-based experiment. The data, analyzed with mixed-design ANOVA and mixed-effect linear models, show main and interaction effects of the verb's semantic class and the verb's (log) frequency. Post-hoc analyses indicate that the effect of the verb's semantic class was primarily due to the idiosyncratic exceptional semantic classes, as predicted by the asymmetric relationship in SLA. A strong effect of frequency was found for the acquisition of the idiosyncratic exceptional semantic classes, indicating that frequency plays a critical role in acquiring (unlearning) grammatical constructions that exist in L1 but not in L2.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Linguistics
