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