Article published In:
Linguistic Approaches to BilingualismVol. 14:2 (2024) ► pp.255–284
L2 acquisition of the Chinese plural marker -men by English and Korean speakers
This article investigates the L2 acquisition of the Chinese plural maker -men by English and Korean speakers within the framework of the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (FRH) (Lardiere, 2009). The Chinese plural suffix -men, the Korean plural suffix -tul, and the English plural suffix -s share some properties and differ on others. Thirty-two English-speaking learners and thirty-five Korean-speaking learners of Chinese of advanced and intermediate proficiency were tested using a truth value judgment task and a grammaticality judgment task. Results show that: (i) all the L2 groups have acquired the target feature set of -men (i.e., [plural, specific, human]); (ii) the two English groups and the advanced Korean group but not the intermediate Korean group have acquired the conditions on the overt realization of -men (i.e., optionality with demonstratives and prohibition with classifiers). The results are consistent with the FRH: differences in how features are assembled in lexical items and differences in conditions on feature realization between the L1 and L2 lead to acquisition difficulty; such difficulty can be overcome, though native-like performance is not guaranteed.
Keywords: feature reassembly, L2 acquisition of plural marking, L1 transfer, Chinese plural marker -men
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Background
- 2.1The Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
- 2.2Previous studies
- 3.Plural marking in English, Korean, and Chinese
- 3.1The plural suffix -s in English
- 3.2The plural suffix -tul in Korean
- 3.3The plural suffix -men in Chinese
- 3.4Summary
- 4.The empirical study
- 4.1Research questions
- 4.2Participants
- 4.3Truth value judgment task
- 4.4Grammaticality judgment task
- 4.5Procedures and analysis
- 5.Results
- 5.1Truth value judgment task
- 5.2Grammaticality judgment task
- 6.Discussion
- 6.1Major findings
- 6.2Adding vs. eliminating features
- 6.3Acquisition trajectory
- 7.Conclusions
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
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