Paper 3285
POS and the Role of Input: The Case of Generics in L2 English
Sunyoung Park and Kook-Hee Gil
177-184 (complete paper or proceedings contents)
Abstract
The present study investigates L2 knowledge of the generic use of bare plural NPs (BPs) in English by Korean speaking learners of English. This paper puts to a test certain distributional properties of generic BPs that represent a poverty of stimulus problem (POS) for Korean speaking learners of English, in particular, when the generic reading of BPs are not allowed in object position after kind selecting predicates. The results of the translation and timed acceptability judgment tasks show that Korean speaking learners are able to acquire the subtle syntactic and semantic restrictions on the generic use of BPs despite the lack of direct evidence for the target property. This was only possible for those learners who had been exposed to prolonged naturalistic L2 input, which proves to play a facilitative role in overcoming POS.
Published in
Proceedings of the 13th Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition Conference (GASLA 2015)
edited by David Stringer, Jordan Garrett, Becky Halloran, and Sabrina Mossman
Table of contents
Paper 3285
POS and the Role of Input: The Case of Generics in L2 English
Sunyoung Park and Kook-Hee Gil
177-184 (complete paper or proceedings contents)
Sunyoung Park and Kook-Hee Gil
177-184 (complete paper or proceedings contents)
Abstract
The present study investigates L2 knowledge of the generic use of bare plural NPs (BPs) in English by Korean speaking learners of English. This paper puts to a test certain distributional properties of generic BPs that represent a poverty of stimulus problem (POS) for Korean speaking learners of English, in particular, when the generic reading of BPs are not allowed in object position after kind selecting predicates. The results of the translation and timed acceptability judgment tasks show that Korean speaking learners are able to acquire the subtle syntactic and semantic restrictions on the generic use of BPs despite the lack of direct evidence for the target property. This was only possible for those learners who had been exposed to prolonged naturalistic L2 input, which proves to play a facilitative role in overcoming POS.
Published in
Proceedings of the 13th Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition Conference (GASLA 2015)
edited by David Stringer, Jordan Garrett, Becky Halloran, and Sabrina Mossman
Table of contents
edited by David Stringer, Jordan Garrett, Becky Halloran, and Sabrina Mossman
Table of contents