Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Is there a critical period for L2 syntax?
- YES
- Lardinere's longitudinal study of Patty
- study on ultimate attainment of L2 grammar + morphosyntax
- Chinese-American adult immigrant learner of English - acquired English successfully under relatively ideal conditions
- English skills serve her well allowing her to perform - bachelor's + master's degree, managerial
position in US company, married native English husband, socialises with English speaker friends
- not native-speaker English - has accent, noticeably non-native
grammatical forms, informal writing
- eg tends to omit past tense, make unnecessary shifts past-present "I met him and go out"
- = some maturational constraints?
- Failed Functional Features Hyp (Hawkins et al) - new
interpretable features can be acquires in L2 but new
uninterpretable features can't.
- X 1 case study can't decide for all
- Johnson + Newport - correlational research
- 46 Chinese + Korean people who've learned English as L2 + live in US
- age of arrival: 3-7, 8-10, 11-15, 17-39
- grammatical judgement task - listened to sentence + judged
whether grammatically correct. INcluded past tense, plural, 3rd
person, determiners, yes/no q's, wh- q's, word order
- age of arrival sig predictor of test success. age of arrival correlated with
performance on test - earlier the better. late arrivals perform worse.
- ultimate attainment in L2 strongly correlated with age of acquisition if before 17. No correlation after 17.
- X length of residence min 5yrs - may not be enough for all learners to reach ultimate attainment level
- X test had 276 items - too long to ensure continued concentration. lower scores of older learners may be because lost attention
- NO
- Morgan-Short et al
- widely believed adults can't learn L2 in same way children learn L1, but recent evidence
suggests L2 learners CAN come to rely on native-like lang brain mechanisms
- Type of lang training impacts this
- Artificial lang
- longitudinal study
- whether explicit training (traditional grammar-focuses classroom setting) or implicit
training (immersion setting) differently affect neural (electyrophysio ERP) + behavioural
(performance) measures of syntactic processing
- performance of both training groups didn't differ at high/low proficiency.
- ERP - big differences between group's neural activity at both proficiency levels in response to syntactic violations
- Explicit training - no sig effects at low proficiency
- only implicit training -> electrophysio signature typical of natives
- suggests adult L2 learners can come to rely on native-like lang
brain mechanisms but conditions are crucial to attain this
- Friederici
- electrophysio evidence that even syntax of lang learned as adult can be processed fully automatically
- Trained adults in carefully constructed artificial lang - BROCANTO
- trained group vs untrained group (only vocab training)
- trained in more natural environment - learned through board game
- Measured ERPs whilst listening to syntactic errors + correct control sentences
- trained = high accuracy in lexical + syntactic tasks. Control = performed well for lexical but syntactic sig diff - only slightly above chance.
- ERP patterns - big group diff
- trained = clear amplitude diff between correct/incorrect. Virutally no effect for controls
- = strongly suggests effects for trained group related directly to syntactic processing. But not definitive
evidence whether it was processing newly acquired syntactic rules or transferred rules from L1
- X Argued trained may have transferred German -> artificial. But controlled by 2 grammatical rules not found in German / known lang by ppts
- = Must be caused by syntactic processing of newly acquired lang = mastered.
- = supports theory that not just AOA (age similar for ppts) but proficiency level determines amount of cortical overlap in L1 + L2 processing
- = indicates late-learned lang can be processed in native like way, so for L2 learning, maturational hyp version needs to be reconsidered