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SUMMARY:The second language acquisition of tense and aspect: a bidirection
 al study of L2 English and L2 Japanese - Tae Yamazaki-Hasegawa\, RCEAL (Ph
 D student)
DTSTART:20090217T160000Z
DTEND:20090217T173000Z
UID:TALK15706@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Susan Rolfe
DESCRIPTION:There is plenty of evidence to show that second language (L2) 
 learners have difficulties in supplying target-like functional morphology.
  Given the availability of Universal Grammar (UG) in L2 acquisition\, ther
 e are two competing views concerning the reasons behind inconsistent uses 
 of functional morphology. On the one hand\, it is argued that L2 learners 
 are able to construct the target-like syntactic representation\, and that 
 inconsistent uses of functional morphology are attributed to problems invo
 lving overt realisation of morphology. Taking this view\, Lardiere (2008) 
 maintains that learning difficulties lie in the reassembly of features\; i
 n other words\, it is problematic for L2 learners to recreate new relation
 s between features and their morphological realisations. On the other hand
 \, it is claimed that L2 learners are not successful in constructing the t
 arget-like syntactic representation. Taking this view\, the Interpretabili
 ty Hypothesis is put forward\, claiming that although UG principles and op
 erations are available in L2 acquisition\, the uninterpretable features of
  the target language which are not instantiated in the learner’s native 
 language are inaccessible (Tsimpli and Mastropavlou 2008). \n\n\nThe prese
 nt study aims to examine if adult second language learners can acquire tar
 get-like grammar concerning tense and aspect. Specifically\, I explore the
  acquisition of form-meaning relations from the two points of view describ
 ed above: the feature interpretability and the feature assembly.  \n\n\nI 
 conducted a proficiency test\, a grammaticality judgment test and two inte
 rpretation tasks. The participants were 42 Japanese speaking learners of E
 nglish (L2 English learners) and 22 English speaking learners of Japanese 
 (L2 Japanese learners) with elementary\, lower-intermediate\, upper-interm
 ediate or advanced proficiency levels. The results of aspectual interpreta
 tion tasks show that the L2 Japanese learners acquire target-like aspectua
 l interpretations earlier than the L2 English learners do. Given that Engl
 ish aspectual markings involve uninterpretable features whereas Japanese a
 spectual markings do not (Hawkins et al. 2008)\, it is expected that the a
 cquisition of L2 English is difficult while that of L2 Japanese is not. Th
 erefore\, the results suggest that the unavailability of uninterpretable f
 eatures obstructs the L2 acquisition. Furthermore\, the misanalyses of rel
 ations between features and their morphological realisations are found amo
 ng both the L2 English and the L2 Japanese learners. Thus\, a difficulty f
 or L2 learners resides in the reassembly of features. In this presentation
 \, I will also discuss the results of grammaticality judgment tests and th
 e temporal interpretation task in the light of the feature interpretabilit
 y and the feature assembly.
LOCATION:GR-06/07\, English Faculty Building
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