Volume 48, Issue 1

This paper addresses the issue of whether negative sentences containing auxiliary do in L1 and L2 English share the same underlying syntactic representation. To this end, I compare the negative sentences produced by 77 bilingual (Spanish/Basque)L2 learners of English with the corresponding data available for L1 acquirers reported on in Schütze (Carson, The status of he/she don't and theories of root infinitives, 2001), under the assumption that L1 and L2 grammars may be underspecified for Tense and/or Agreement features. I conclude that, despite similarities in the type of errors children and L2 learners produce, the L2 data do not show evidence of underspecification. Rather, it appears that L2 learners use a lexical strategy whereby they adopt don't as an independent preverbal negative marker.

By means of a phraseological identification method, this study provides a general description of the use of conventional sequences (CSs) in interviews at four different levels of spoken L2 French as well as in interviews with native speakers. Use of conventional sequences is studied with regard to overall quantity, category distribution and type frequencies. The most predictive measure is overall quantity, which yields significant differences between several learner levels. It is also found that Lexical CSs are the most difficult to acquire for second language speakers: only the most advanced group use them to the same extent as native speakers. No significant differences are found between the most advanced group of L2 speakers (LOR in France >5 yrs) and native speakers, probably due to the measures and the task investigated. The results are then related to Ellis et al. (TESOL Quarterly 42: 375–396, 2008), suggesting that the sequences' frequencies of occurrence vs. their MI score in a larger corpus might influence their acquisition and use.

Previous studies using judgments of morphosyntactic errors have shown mixed evidence for a critical period for L2 acquisition (e.g., Birdsong & Molis, Journal of Memory and Language 44: 235–249, 2001, Johnson & Newport, Cognitive Psychology 21: 60–99, 1989). This study uses anomalies in the domain of information structure, the interface between syntactic form and pragmatic function, to shed light on the effect of age of arrival on L2 performance. In two experiments, high-proficiency L2 speakers of French were presented with sentence pairs containing either expected or anomalous information structure. Subjects judged each exchange as acceptable or unacceptable. A weak post-maturational effect of age on acceptability task performance was observed, along with a high degree of nativelike performance. These results are incompatible with the traditional notion of a critical period for second language acquisition in this domain of language, and also suggest that long periods of immersion in the L2 environment can lead to nativelike performance on tasks relating to information structure.