2018 Annual Conference of China English Language Education Association (CELEA2018)

190 / 2018-06-30 16:32:04

Effects of L1 on L2 morphological awareness

morphological awareness

Plenary track > 中国特色二语习得研究

Previous studies of L2 morphological processing are controversial regarding whether L2 learners decompose morphologically complex words similarly to native speakers, and whether there are L1 influences on L2 morphological processing. Previous studies have not systematically examined influence from different L1 morphological typologies, which may have contributed to conflicting results. The current study was the first to systematically examine effects of L1 typology on L2 morphological awareness.
Three L2 English groups of typologically different L1s were recruited: Turkish (agglutinative, alphabetic), Chinese (isolating, logographic) and Vietnamese (isolating, alphabetic), along with a native English (analytic, alphabetic) control group. Participants’ English morphological awareness was measured in a series of computerized off-line tasks, including a derivation task, a multiple choice word task, a multiple choice non-word task, a morphological relatedness task, and a suffix-ordering task. Their English proficiency was measured using the LexTALE test (Lemhöfer & Broersma, 2012).
Results revealed clear effects of L1 morphological typological differences on L2 morphological awareness. The Turkish (but not Chinese or Vietnamese) group outperformed the English group even without accounting for language proficiency.
This study has theoretical implications for the representation and processing of the bilingual lexicon by demonstrating clear L1 typological influences on L2 morphological awareness. The results of the current study highlight the need against comparative fallacy (Bley-Vroman, 1983; Dekydtspotter, Schwartz, & Sprouse, 2006). Native-like performance is further proven not to be an end point: L2 learners can even outperform native speakers.