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Article published In: Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Vol. 14:2 (2024) ► pp.255–284

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L2 acquisition of the Chinese plural marker -men by English and Korean speakers

 | Beijing Foreign Studies University
Published online: 8 September 2022
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.21025.su
Abstract
This article investigates the L2 acquisition of the Chinese plural maker -men by English and Korean speakers within the framework of the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (FRH) (Lardiere, D. (2009). Some thoughts on the contrastive analysis of features in second language acquisition. Second Language Research, 25(2), 173–227. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). The Chinese plural suffix -men, the Korean plural suffix -tul, and the English plural suffix -s share some properties and differ on others. Thirty-two English-speaking learners and thirty-five Korean-speaking learners of Chinese of advanced and intermediate proficiency were tested using a truth value judgment task and a grammaticality judgment task. Results show that: (i) all the L2 groups have acquired the target feature set of -men (i.e., [plural, specific, human]); (ii) the two English groups and the advanced Korean group but not the intermediate Korean group have acquired the conditions on the overt realization of -men (i.e., optionality with demonstratives and prohibition with classifiers). The results are consistent with the FRH: differences in how features are assembled in lexical items and differences in conditions on feature realization between the L1 and L2 lead to acquisition difficulty; such difficulty can be overcome, though native-like performance is not guaranteed.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1The Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
    • 2.2Previous studies
  • 3.Plural marking in English, Korean, and Chinese
    • 3.1The plural suffix -s in English
    • 3.2The plural suffix -tul in Korean
    • 3.3The plural suffix -men in Chinese
    • 3.4Summary
  • 4.The empirical study
    • 4.1Research questions
    • 4.2Participants
    • 4.3Truth value judgment task
    • 4.4Grammaticality judgment task
    • 4.5Procedures and analysis
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Truth value judgment task
    • 5.2Grammaticality judgment task
  • 6.Discussion
    • 6.1Major findings
    • 6.2Adding vs. eliminating features
    • 6.3Acquisition trajectory
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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