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Article published In:
Acquisition of Chinese: Bilingualism and Multilingualism
Edited by Boping Yuan and Yanyu Guo
[Journal of Second Language Studies 3:2] 2020
► pp. 205–232

Roles of positive and indirect negative evidence in L2 feature reassembly

An empirical study of L2 acquisition of Chinese and Thai collective markers

| Beijing Normal University
| University of Cambridge
This article reports an empirical study investigating L2 acquisition of the Mandarin Chinese collective marker -men by adult Thai-speaking learners and the Thai collective marker phûak- by adult Chinese-speaking learners within the framework of the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere, 2009a, 2009b). An acceptability judgment test was administered to learners with beginning, intermediate and advanced proficiencies of Chinese and Thai (n = 114) as well as native speaker controls (n = 30). The results reveal a facilitating role of positive evidence in L2 feature reassembly as Chinese learners who are exposed to positive evidence of “phûak + animal noun” and “phûak + indefinite noun” structures in their Thai input perform native-like on these structures from an intermediate level onward. On the other hand, feature reassembly is hindered when positive evidence is unavailable as in the case of Thai learners of Chinese where no evidence they receive in the input shows ungrammaticality of “animal noun + men” and “indefinite noun + men” structures in Chinese. These learners mostly fail to perform native-like even at an advanced level.
Keywords: L2 acquisition, feature reassembly, positive evidence, indirect negative evidence, Chinese, Thai, collective markers
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Collective markers in Chinese and Thai
  • 3.L2 acquisition
    • 3.1Feature reassembly
    • 3.2Positive and indirect negative evidence
  • 4.Experimental study
    • 4.1Research questions and predictions
    • 4.2Participants
    • 4.3Tasks
    • 4.4Materials
    • 4.5Procedures
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Methods of data analysis
    • 5.2Acquisition of animacy restrictions on collective markers
    • 5.3Acquisition of the definiteness restriction on collective markers
  • 6.Discussion
    • 6.1Answers to research questions and validating predictions
    • 6.2Positive evidence and the notion of “detectability” in FRH
    • 6.3Indirect negative evidence
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 5 February 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jsls.00011.pra
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