Volume 40, Issue 2 - Special Issue: Crosslinguistic Influences in Language Acquisition I

The study compares how L1 Chinese and Japanese speakers perceive L2 English semivowels (/j/ and /w/) preceding high vowels (/i/ and /u/). In Chinese, [j] and [w] serve as phonetic variants of /i/ and /u/, respectively. However, /j/ and /w/ are distinct phonemes in Japanese, although Japanese /w/ lacks the roundness feature found in English /w/. Participants completed experiments with a discrimination task and an identification task. While the discrimination task revealed no differences in /j/ and /w/ perception between the groups, the identification task showed that the Japanese speakers outperformed the Chinese speakers in their perception of /j/, suggesting an L1 “phonemic over phonetic” advantage. However, the Japanese speakers did not outperform the Chinese speakers in their perception of /w/, suggesting that an L2 feature unexploited in the L1 (i.e., roundness) can impede perception. These findings underscore the importance of considering both phonemic status and features in L2 speech perception.

This paper discusses Japanese-speaking EFL learners’ acquisition of English object relative clauses (ORC), which have intervention (Relativized Minimality) structures. Specifically, we contrast their early understanding of the ORC and the Subject Control constructions with their late understanding of the Subject Raising ( seem ) construction that exhibits a structural effect of locality on the filler-gap relation. We argue that relativization and the Control structure in Japanese induce hierarchical structures on par with those in English. Therefore, the learners have acquired a way of avoiding intervention during the process of acquiring the ORC and the Control structures in Japanese. L1 grammatical knowledge helps nullify the intervention effect in acquiring the constructions in L2 English. On the other hand, it takes time for them to overcome the effect by learning the seem raising structure with a specific strategy because Japanese does not have a construction similar to it. L1 Japanese critically influences the acquisition of L2 English with respect to the intervention configurations.

There are crosslinguistic variations for backward anaphora coreference readings although the languages, such as English, Italian, Russian, and Mandarin, that have been experimentally studied are constrained by Principle C. English allows backward anaphora coreference readings between the pronoun and the antecedent NP for sentences like “While he was dancing, Kermit ate the pizza”, but languages like Russian, Mandarin, and Japanese prohibit the coreference readings for some types of temporal subordinate clauses. In addition to the macrovariation between the English type of languages versus the Russian/Mandarin/Japanese type of languages, a microvariation exists between Mandarin and Japanese. Due to idiosyncratic constraints in Mandarin, the acceptance rate for the coreference reading in sentences with the ‘because’ clause was substantially lower in Mandarin than in Japanese. In this study, we report findings from an experiment on bi-directional L2 acquisition of backward anaphora between Mandarin and Japanese which demonstrate similar mechanisms underlying both macrovariation and microvariation for pronoun resolution of backward anaphora sentences.

Adopting the anti-agreement hypothesis that argument ellipsis is allowed in languages lacking φ-feature agreement, the present study investigates whether second language (L2) learners of φ-feature agreement languages (L1-English L2 learners of Japanese; ELJs) and L2 learners of anti-agreement languages (L1-Mandarin Chinese L2 learners of Japanese; CLJs) can access sloppy interpretations of Japanese null arguments. The results concerning null subjects indicate that both L2 groups behaved similarly to Japanese native speakers (JNSs) by allowing the sloppy reading of null subjects. However, further analysis by L2 proficiency revealed distinct patterns. Intermediate ELJs exhibited L1-transfer of φ-feature agreement, assigning null subjects the strict reading, while the advanced ELJs were able to discard the φ-feature, allowing the sloppy reading. In contrast, CLJs accepted the sloppy reading from the intermediate level, indicating that the absence of the φ-feature functioned as positive transfer. Regarding the results with null objects, both L2 groups performed like JNSs, allowing the sloppy interpretation. Assuming that deleting a feature present in L1 is more difficult than adding a feature absent in L1 to L2, we will explain the results in terms of L1 transfer.

This study investigates the effects of orthographic and phonological overlaps between the first language (L1) and the second language (L2) during word naming by adult Chinese-Japanese bilinguals, in the light of the Orthographic Depth Hypothesis which posits that the processing of printed words depends on the extent of grapheme-phoneme correspondence in the language. We compared their naming performance of L2 Japanese words written in moraic hiragana which is not used in their L1 Chinese, morphosyllabic kanji utilized in L1, and a mixed condition. Results indicated a longer latency for naming L2 Japanese words with kun -reading which has no phonological overlap with L1, particularly when written in kanji , which has orthographic overlap with L1. Consistent with the Orthographic Depth Hypothesis, participants performed better for words in hiragana as a shallow orthography than for words in kanji as a deep orthography. Furthermore, this study examined the priming effect of L2 Japanese translation equivalents on L1 Chinese targets. We found more accurate and faster naming of L1 words semantically exposed by L2, suggesting that L2 semantic representation facilitates L1 translation equivalence.