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1 results

  • L1 Influence vs. Universal Mechanisms: An SLA-Driven Corpus Study on Temporal Expression

  • Edited by Bert Le Bruyn, Magali Paquot
  • Book:
    Learner Corpus Research Meets Second Language Acquisition
    Published online:
    29 December 2020
    Print publication:
    21 January 2021, pp 39-66

  • Summary

    Both influence of language learners’ L1 (“transfer”) and universal mechanisms have been forwarded as important determinants in Second Language Acquisition. This study weighs these claims against each other through a case study on temporal expression, looking at the alternation between the Present Perfect and the Simple Past in L2 English. It analyzes written and spoken data from two learner samples, one with a similar structure in the L1 (German), the other one (Cantonese) lacking such a structure, and compares them against native data, using a multifactorial regression-based approach. The results suggest higher error rates of Cantonese-speaking learners, so that target-like use of past-referring time-reference forms is mediated by L1 influence. By contrast, L1 influence is not traceable when the distributions of usage contexts and error conditioning are compared across the learner samples and with the native baseline data, suggesting a prevalence of universal mechanisms conspiring with linguistic factors.