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THE PRODUCTION OF SUBJECT-VERB AGREEMENT AMONG SWEDISH AND CHINESE SECOND LANGUAGE SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 April 2018

Carrie N. Jackson ,
Elizabeth Mormer  and
Laurel Brehm
Carrie N. Jackson*
Affiliation:
The Pennsylvania State University
Elizabeth Mormer
Affiliation:
The Pennsylvania State University
Laurel Brehm
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, NL
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Carrie N. Jackson, 442 Burrowes Building, Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802. E-mail: cnj1@psu.edu
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Abstract

This study uses a sentence completion task with Swedish and Chinese L2 English speakers to investigate how L1 morphosyntax and L2 proficiency influence L2 English subject-verb agreement production. Chinese has limited nominal and verbal number morphology, while Swedish has robust noun phrase (NP) morphology but does not number-mark verbs. Results showed that like L1 English speakers, both L2 groups used grammatical and conceptual number to produce subject-verb agreement. However, only L1 Chinese speakers—and less-proficient speakers in both L2 groups—were similarly influenced by grammatical and conceptual number when producing the subject NP. These findings demonstrate how L2 proficiency, perhaps combined with cross-linguistic differences, influence L2 production and underscore that encoding of noun and verb number are not independent.

Type
Research Report
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 40 , Issue 4 , December 2018 , pp. 907 - 921
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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Footnotes

We thank Marianne Gullberg at Lunds Universitet in Sweden for help with collection of the L1 Swedish speaker data. We also thank Jack DiMidio, Marta Millar, Alexa Rossi, and Ted Smith for help with the L1 Chinese and L1 English speaker data collection and transcription, and two reviewers for their valuable comments. This research was funded in part by the National Science Foundation under grant OISE-0968369 (PI: J. F. Kroll; co-PIs: P. E. Dussias and J. G. van Hell).

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