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The Bottleneck Hypothesis in L2 Acquisition

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The Bottleneck Hypothesis in L2 Acquisition Department of Language and Linguistics The Bottleneck Hypothesis in L2 acquisition Norwegian L1 speakers’ knowledge of syntax and morphology in English L2 — Isabel Nadine Jensen Master thesis in English Linguistics May 2016 Acknowledgements First of all, I would like to thank my supervisor, Marit Westergaard, for support and guidance throughout this process. I would also like to thank Roumyana Slabakova for valuable advice and feedback. Thanks to the LAVA group at the Faculty of Humanities, Social Science and Education, Department of Language and Linguistics for receiving the master’s grant, and for letting me take part in interesting and fruitful seminars and discussions. Thanks also to Björn Lundquist for helping me with R and the analysis of the data, to all of the participants in the pilot study and the main experiment, and to the schools and teachers who let me test their students. I would further like to thank Tone, Sten Ove, Marte, and Christian for proof reading and moral support, and finally, thank you Nikolai, for your technical and moral support, motivation and inspiration during this last year. 1 Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 5 2 Theoretical background..................................................................................................... 10 2.1 Second language acquisition ..................................................................................... 10 2.1.1 Transfer .............................................................................................................. 14 2.1.2 Access to UG ...................................................................................................... 15 2.2 The Bottleneck Hypothesis ........................................................................................ 16 2.2.1 A contrasting view: the Interface Hypothesis .................................................... 20 2.2.2 The Bottleneck Hypothesis versus the Interface Hypothesis ............................. 23 2.3 Constructions ............................................................................................................. 25 2.3.1 Verb movement .................................................................................................. 25 2.3.2 Subject-verb agreement ...................................................................................... 30 2.4 Previous research on L2 acquisition of agreement and verb movement ................... 32 2.4.1 Dröschel (2011) ................................................................................................. 32 2.4.2 Håkansson and Collberg (1994) ......................................................................... 33 2.4.3 Ocampo (2013) ................................................................................................... 37 2.4.4 Slabakova and Gajdos (2008) ............................................................................ 41 2.4.5 Westergaard (2003) ............................................................................................ 43 3 Research questions and methodology ............................................................................... 46 3.1 Research questions .................................................................................................... 46 3.2 Hypothesis and predictions ........................................................................................ 46 3.3 Method ....................................................................................................................... 49 3.4 The pilot study ........................................................................................................... 52 3.5 The main experiment ................................................................................................. 53 3.5.1 Procedure ............................................................................................................ 53 3.5.2 Sentences ............................................................................................................ 56 3.5.3 Participants ......................................................................................................... 59 2 4 Results ............................................................................................................................... 61 4.1 The proficiency test ................................................................................................... 61 4.2 The acceptability judgement test ............................................................................... 63 4.2.1 Agreement .......................................................................................................... 65 4.2.2 Verb movement .................................................................................................. 66 4.2.3 Comparison of agreement and verb movement .................................................. 67 4.2.4 Differences between proficiency groups ............................................................ 69 4.2.5 Morphological conditions .................................................................................. 73 4.2.6 Syntactic conditions ........................................................................................... 78 4.2.7 Results without long-distance agreement ........................................................... 81 5 Discussion ......................................................................................................................... 86 5.1 Is functional morphology more difficult than narrow syntax in L2 acquisition? ...... 88 5.2 Is functional morphology a more persistent problem than narrow syntax? .............. 90 5.3 Which of the morphological and syntactic conditions are more difficult? ................ 92 5.3.1 Syntactic conditions ........................................................................................... 92 5.3.2 Morphological conditions .................................................................................. 94 6 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 98 7 References ....................................................................................................................... 101 8 Appendix ......................................................................................................................... 111 3 4 Introduction In this thesis, Roumyana Slabakova’s (2006; 2008; 2013) Bottleneck Hypothesis is tested in second language (L2) acquisition of English by Norwegian speakers. The issue of why something is difficult or easy to acquire in an L2 is a widely discussed topic (see e.g. Sorace and Filiaci 2006; Sorace 2011). The reason why I find it interesting to address this is that it provides insight about the cognitive process involved in language acquisition, and it may point towards implications for language teaching. The former notion is the main purpose of this thesis: to contribute to current knowledge of the cognitive process of L2 acquisition. In short, the Bottleneck Hypothesis argues that functional morphology is the bottleneck in L2 acquisition, and thus more difficult to acquire than linguistic domains such as syntax, semantics, and internal and external interfaces. In this thesis, I only focus on the comparison of syntax and functional morphology. Based on this, the hypothesis in the current thesis is that English L2 learners’ performance on functional morphology is weaker than their performance on syntax. In order to investigate the Bottleneck Hypothesis, I pose the following research questions: RQ1: Is morphology more difficult than narrow syntax in L2 acquisition? RQ2: Is morphology a more persistent problem than narrow syntax? In order to test research questions 1 and 2, I compare acquisition of subject-verb agreement, which represents functional morphology, and verb movement, which represents narrow syntax. The reason for this is that there is a mismatch between Norwegian and English with respect to these two constructions. That is, there is no overt agreement morphology in Norwegian, whereas English marks present tense verbs when the subjects are 3rd person singular. In addition, Norwegian is a V2 (verb second) language, which means that the verb always occurs in the second position of a declarative main clause. English, on the other hand, is an SVO language (subject-verb-object), which means that the verb stays in VP in these types of sentences. Example of the mismatches are provided in (1) and (2): 5 (1) Subject-verb agreement a. Mary drinks wine [English] b. Mary and John drink wine [English] c. Mari drikker vin [Norwegian] Mari drinks wine ‘Mary drinks wine’ d. Mari og Jon drikker vin [Norwegian] Mari and Jon drink wine ‘Mari and Jon drink wine’ (2) Verb movement a. Yesterday Mary drank wine [English] b. I går drakk Mari vin [Norwegian] Yesterday drank Mari wine ‘Yesterday Mari drank wine’ It is expected that accurate functional morphology is not only more challenging, but also that it is a more persistent problem as the learners become more advanced speakers of English. This is based on previous research on acquisition of syntax and functional morphology which has laid the foundation of the Bottleneck Hypothesis (see e.g. Ionin and Wexler 2002; Haznedar 2001; Lardiere 1998a,b). These studies have found that syntax comes before functional morphology in L2 acquisition.
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