Successful second language acquisition when the cards are stacked against you

What is it about?

In this study, we investigated native English speakers learning Mandarin as a second language (L2). We tested their interpretation of certain pronouns in particular grammatical structures (i.e., sentence types) which we hypothesised would be especially challenging on the basis that: 1) In English, there are no equivalent structures to those we test in Mandarin. Furthermore, in the English structures which are similar to the Mandarin structures, pronouns cannot be interpreted in exactly the same way. Therefore, learners who draw on their knowledge of English may be lead astray in Mandarin. 2) Mandarin has certain types of pronouns which are not found in English. Thus, learners have no existing knowledge of these pronouns from English to help them. 3) There are structures in Mandarin which are similar to those we investigate, yet the interpretation of pronouns in those structures is subtly different. Learners may experience interference from those other (more frequent) Mandarin structures, leading to incorrect interpretations. 4) Most importantly, we argue that one of the structures we test represents what’s known as a Poverty of the Stimulus (PoS) learning situation. PoS situations arise in cases where it is not possible to learn a structure or interpretation solely on the basis of the input a learner is exposed to (i.e., what they hear and read), as the evidence needed to acquire the structure is simply not present in the input. In our study, a PoS learning task arises where a specific interpretation of one type of pronoun is not possible in Mandarin, however there is nothing in the input that indicates to learners that this interpretation is not possible. Furthermore, the fact that this interpretation does not appear in the input would not allow the learners to categorically rule out the interpretation (in other words, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence). Despite the cards being stacked against them, on the experimental task which tested sentence interpretation, the L2 learners were statistically indistinguishable from a group of native Mandarin speakers in all but one context. However, even in this context they successfully acquired the correct interpretation in Mandarin overall. What else did we find? We initially aimed to replicate an earlier study which tested the same grammatical structures but with monolingual Mandarin speaking children. However, the results from our replicated experiment showed that our native Mandarin speakers interpreted one of the structures differently to the native Mandarin speakers in the previous study and also in a manner that contradicted existing theoretical analyses of this structure. We therefore propose a new, alternative syntactic analysis to account for our native speaker data and apply this to our L2 acquisition study.

Featured Image

Photo by freddie marriage on Unsplash

Photo by freddie marriage on Unsplash

Why is it important?

• Our results add to existing evidence of successful acquisition in PoS situations. Namely, learners are capable of acquiring properties for which the second language provides no direct, positive evidence. • We attribute the differences between our results and those of the previous study to differences in control group size (51 vs. 9 speakers). Our findings therefore also highlight the importance of using sizable control groups in experimental linguistics research, particularly if the structure exhibits variability or has rarely been investigated empirically.