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Paths of Processing Strategy Transfers in Learning Japanese and English as Foreign Languages

A Competition Model Approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2008

Yoshinori Sasaki
Yoshinori Sasaki
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
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Abstract

This paper reports on a competition model experiment designed to investigate the sentence-processing strategies of English-speaking learners of Japanese (JFL learners) and Japanese-speaking learners of English. The participants were required to identify the sentence subject of a series of English and Japanese word strings, each consisting of one verb and two nouns, in which noun-animacy, word-order, and case-marking cues either competed or were consistent with each other. The results indicated a correlation between learners' proficiency in Japanese and case-marker dependency in Japanese strings. JFL learners primarily resorted to animacy cues to interpret Japanese strings, suggesting a prepotent role for lexical semantics. There was little evidence of transfer of surface word order, although some JFL learners resorted to the Japanese canonical SOV order to a greater extent than the native Japanese.

Type
Articles
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , March 1994 , pp. 43 - 72
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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