A Feature-based Contrastive Approach to the L2 Acquisition of Specificity

• Jacee Cho ^[1] ; Roumyana Slabakova ^[2]
  1. [1] University of Wisconsin–Madison

     University of Wisconsin–Madison

     City of Madison, Estados Unidos

     
  2. [2] University of Iowa

     University of Iowa

     City of Iowa City, Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: Applied linguistics, ISSN 0142-6001, Vol. 38, Nº 3, 2017, págs. 318-339
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • This study examined the acquisition of the Russian indefinite determiners (kakoj-to ‘which-to’ and kakoj-nibud’ ‘which-nibud’’) encoding scopal specificity by English and Korean native speakers within the feature-based contrastive framework (Lardiere 2008, 2009). The specificity markers kakoj-to and kakoj-nibud’ are reflections of different values of three major nominal features: definiteness, scopal specificity, and referentiality. The learning task for each functional item differs with respect to mapping and reconfiguration of the feature combinations. Our experimental data suggest that the morpheme kakoj-to was acquired early since English (some) and Korean (eotteon ‘some’) have the corresponding morphemes with the same featural representation as the Russian kakoj-to. The morpheme kakoj-nibud’ presented a greater difficulty since its featural make-up is not overtly realized in English or Korean, that is, learners had to reassemble the target feature set. Such developmental patterns provide evidence that feature reassembly poses a challenge in second language acquisition. On the basis of the findings, pedagogical implications are discussed.