L1 AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF INTERLANGUAGE GRAMMARS

L1 and the development of interlanguage grammars



Table of Contents

Introduction3

L1 transfer in L2 acquisition: theory and description3

L1 transfer and L2 acquisition of prosody5

Past research on the L2 acquisition of prosody5

Towards a research design for the study of prosodic transfer8

Case study: pitch accent in L2 prosody10

Past research on the L2 acquisition of pitch accent10

References13

Appendix24

L1 and the development of interlanguage grammars

Introduction

The significance of cross-linguistic influence/L1 transfer, i.e. the carry over of linguistic patterns from the mother tongue (L1) to the second/foreign language (L2), has long been a controversial issue in applied linguistics, L2 acquisition research and language teaching (Ellis 1994, Odlin 1989). Despite the myriad of transfer studies that have been conducted over the past four decades, there still remains a surprising level of confusion and uncertainty in the field concerning when, where, in what form(s), and to what extent L1 influence mani- fests itself in the L2 learners' use of the target language (Jarvis 2000). This paper examines the role of the L1 in the L2 acquisition of su- prasegmentals/prosody, i.e. a combination of tonal, temporal and dy- namic features associated with such suprasegmental aspects of phono- logy as stress, accent, tone, rhythm, intonation, and pauses. More spe- cifically, we discuss both past research results as well as methods of data collection and analysis. We also propose a methodological path for the study of prosodic transfer. This method is finally put to the test in a study of the L2 acquisition of pitch accent in Dutch and French.

L1 transfer in L2 acquisition: theory and description

In the 1950's, behaviourist psychology regarded L2 learning as a process of linguistic habit formation that was systematically influ- enced by the learners' L1. It was thought that L1 transfer enhanced L2 acquisition when the same linguistic elements were present in both the first and the second language (i.e. positive transfer), but that it had an interfering effect when there was a difference between the two lan- guages (i.e. negative transfer/interference). Contrastive analyses (CA) had to be conducted in order to make predictions about the linguistic structures an L2 learner would have difficulty with (Lado 1957). One such example of contrastive analysis of prosody is a study by Debrock & Jouret (1970) in which the authors compared the prosodic characte- ristics of Dutch and French and then used the results of their compari- son to predict intonation errors of French-speaking learners of Dutch. In the 1970's, the emergence of mentalist models of L2 acquisition as well as the results of error analyses (Corder 1981) brought CA as a research tool into a period of disfavour. One of the common argu- ments was that predictive CA was blind to the nature of acquisition and could not provide a qualitative account of the actual acquisition process. Contrary to Lado's hypothesis, an L2 feature may be new to the learner, and yet easy to acquire. Conversely, an L2 item may prove resistant to acquisition despite its similarity with L1 ...