Abstract for Natalie Batman's talk

Acquisition of Interrogatives in L2
Natalie Batman (CUNY)
April 25, 2006 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

An on-going debate in both child first language (L1) and adult second language (L2) acquisition is over whether a learner's initial knowledge of grammar includes no syntactic information, partial information of lexical but not functional categories, or a full syntactic representation, including functional projections. This study investigates that question with L2 learners and their acquisition of interrogatives. Children and adults learning English have particular difficulty mastering the structure of interrogatives. There are two important components in the formation of interrogatives in English: (a) knowledge of the equivalence class of elements that invert with the subject, and (b) representation of a landing site for the inverted auxiliary. Currently, it is unclear which component contributes to the difficulties that learners experience. Previous studies claim that L2 learners- difficulty is the absence of a landing site for the inverted auxiliary, thus supporting a hypothesis of partial representations. This talk provides a close examination of acquisition of interrogatives on the part of adult early L2 learners from two different first language backgrounds. The experiment used an elicited imitation task with two groups of early L2 learners (Asian group = speakers of Japanese and Korean; Non-Asian group = speakers of Indo-European languages). Regardless of their first language, the major error was omission of an auxiliary. Notably, when these learners included an auxiliary, they properly inverted it, thus suggesting that their representations contain functional projections. The findings suggest that for adult L2 learners the challenge is formation of an equivalence class of elements that invert with the subject; one result of the difficulty of forming the relevant class is the omission of auxiliaries.