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Article published In:
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Vol. 12:5 (2022) ► pp.687–713

Cross-linguistic influence in the second language processing of Korean morphological and syntactic causative constructions

| Ewha Womans University
ORCID logo | Yonsei University

This study investigated the effects of cross-linguistic influence in Japanese speakers’ integration of morphological and syntactic information during the processing of Korean transitive causative constructions. We examined whether Japanese speakers would process two types of Korean causative constructions as efficiently as native speakers: (a) when one target structure was instantiated differently from learners’ L1 correspondents and (b) when the other type was unique to the L2. Although the learners showed native-like performance during an acceptability judgment task, they had difficulties with the integration of morphological and syntactic information during a self-paced reading task when the target construction gave rise to cross-linguistic competitions with the L1 correspondent, but not when the target construction was unique to the L1. Our findings support the claim that cross-linguistic cue competitions are a major source of difficulties in L2 sentence processing.

Keywords: Korean causative construction, cross-linguistic influence, competition, L2 processing, self-paced reading
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Causative constructions in Korean and Japanese
  • 3.Theoretical approaches to effects of cross-linguistic competition in L2 processing
  • 4.Present study and predictions
  • 5.Methods
    • 5.1Participants
    • 5.2Materials and procedure
      • 5.2.1Acceptability judgment task
      • 5.2.2Self-paced reading task
  • 6.Results and discussion
    • 6.1Acceptability judgment task
    • 6.2Self-paced reading task
  • 7.General discussion and conclusion
  • Supplementary materials
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 5 February 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.20026.par
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