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L1 Influence vs. Universal Mechanisms: An SLA-Driven Corpus Study on Temporal Expression

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 December 2020

By
Valentin Werner,
Robert Fuchs and
Sandra Götz
Edited by
Bert Le Bruyn and
Magali Paquot
Bert Le Bruyn
Affiliation:
UIL-OTS, Utrecht University
Magali Paquot
Affiliation:
FNRS – Centre for English Corpus Linguistics, UCLouvain
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Summary

Both influence of language learners’ L1 (“transfer”) and universal mechanisms have been forwarded as important determinants in Second Language Acquisition. This study weighs these claims against each other through a case study on temporal expression, looking at the alternation between the Present Perfect and the Simple Past in L2 English. It analyzes written and spoken data from two learner samples, one with a similar structure in the L1 (German), the other one (Cantonese) lacking such a structure, and compares them against native data, using a multifactorial regression-based approach. The results suggest higher error rates of Cantonese-speaking learners, so that target-like use of past-referring time-reference forms is mediated by L1 influence. By contrast, L1 influence is not traceable when the distributions of usage contexts and error conditioning are compared across the learner samples and with the native baseline data, suggesting a prevalence of universal mechanisms conspiring with linguistic factors.

Keywords

temporal referencetenseaspectL1 influencepresent perfectsimple pastadvanced learnersChinese learner EnglishGerman learner EnglishMuPDAR

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Chapter
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Learner Corpus Research Meets Second Language Acquisition , pp. 39 - 66
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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