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Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition North America (GALANA) edited by Alyona Belikova, Luisa Meroni, and Mari Umeda ISBN 978-1-57473-419-5 library binding vii + 490 pages publication date: 2007 published by Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA, USA Table of contents Abstract Fufen Jin, Tor A. Åfarli, and Wim A. van Dommelen Endstate L2 Competence: Does Perception Parallel Production? 200-211 (complete pdf) This paper investigates the interrelation between production and perception in endstate L2 speakers, through examining the production and perception of Norwegian DPs by L2 speakers of Norwegian, who were from L1 backgrounds of Italian/Spanish, English, and Chinese, respectively. Norwegian D carries uninterpretable gender, number, and definiteness features. The source languages in question differ parametrically from the target language with respect to one, two, or all of the uninterpretable features. The informants were tested on two tasks: an online DP production task and an auditory naming task. The aim of the production task was to determine whether the uninterpretable features are present in the interlanguage grammar regardless of presence or absence of the corresponding features in the L1s; the aim of the auditory naming task was to examine whether the L2 speakers' sensitivity (or insensitivity) to the agreement cues is directly related to how well they produce the correct agreements. Results from the production task divided the L2 participants into two groups: some informants performed native-like, while the others showed a strong L1 effect -- those uninterpretable features which are not instantiated in L1s were areas of persistent difficulty in these L2 speakers. Results from the auditory naming task suggest that adult L2 learners do not completely acquire the same processing mechanism as the natives, despite their native-like performance in the production task. The results are discussed in terms of current SLA theories on language production and processing. |