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Article published In: Representation and Processing in Bilingual Morphology
Edited by Jennifer R. Austin
[Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 9:1] 2019
► pp. 73–119

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Feature reassembly in the acquisition of plural marking by Korean and Indonesian bilinguals

A bidirectional study

 | University of Pennsylvania
 | Georgetown University
Published online: 10 July 2017
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.16018.lee
This bidirectional study investigated the L2 acquisition of plural marking in L2 Indonesian by native Korean speakers and in L2 Korean by native Indonesian speakers. Indonesian and Korean are classifier languages with partially overlapping restrictions on how pluralization interacts with quantification, allowing us to test the acquisition of new L2 features vs. the preemption of L1 features that are not in the L2. We also examined how the contextual complexity of new L2 features impacts development. Seventy learners at three L2 Korean proficiency levels and 40 native controls participated in Experiment 1; 61 learners at three L2 Indonesian proficiency levels and 39 native controls participated in Experiment 2. All participants completed three tasks – a Sentence Completion Task, a Grammaticality Judgment Task and a Multiple-Choice Task. Whereas learners were largely able to overcome the difficulty of preemption, they were less successful in acquiring new L2 feature contrasts in more complex conditioning environments.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Feature (re-)assembly in second language acquisition
    • 1.2Preemption in L2 acquisition
    • 1.3Feature hierarchies and computational complexity
  • 2.The number marking systems of Indonesian and Korean
    • 2.1Plural marking in classifier languages?
    • 2.2Classifiers in Indonesian and Korean
    • 2.3Classifiers with quantifiers
    • 2.4Plural marking in Indonesian and Korean
    • 2.5Plural marking with quantifiers
    • 2.6Numeral quantifiers + classifiers with plural marking
    • 2.7Features needed to acquire number marking in Korean and Indonesian
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Participants
      • 3.1.1Participants in Experiment 1 (L1 Indonesian/L2 Korean)
      • 3.1.2Participants in Experiment 2 (L1 Korean/L2 Indonesian)
    • 3.2Materials and procedures
      • 3.2.1Sentence completion task (SCT)
      • 3.2.2Grammaticality judgment task (GJT)
      • 3.2.3Multiple choice task (MCT)
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Results for Experiment 1 (L1 Indonesian/L2 Korean)
      • 4.1.1Sentence completion task (SCT)
      • 4.1.2Grammaticality judgment task (GJT)
      • 4.1.3Multiple choice test (MCT)
    • 4.2Results for Experiment 2 (L1 Korean/L2 Indonesian)
      • 4.2.1Sentence completion task (SCT)
      • 4.2.2Grammaticality judgment task (GJT)
      • 4.2.3Multiple choice task (MCT)
  • 5.Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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