ERIC Number: EJ1198799
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2018-Dec
Pages: 15
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0272-2631
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Available Date: N/A
The Production of Subject-Verb Agreement among Swedish and Chinese Second Language Speakers of English
Jackson, Carrie N.; Mormer, Elizabeth; Brehm, Laurel
Studies in Second Language Acquisition, v40 n4 p907-921 Dec 2018
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.
Descriptors: Second Language Learning, Form Classes (Languages), Verbs, Morphology (Languages), Nouns, Language Proficiency, English (Second Language), Language Variation
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
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Language: English
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