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Article published In:
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Vol. 5:3 (2015) ► pp.322–355

Acquisition of English verb transitivity by native speakers of Japanese

| The City University of New York (LaGuardia Community College)

This study is concerned with native Japanese speakers’ acquisition of English lexical causativity. In Japanese, a large number of verbs, including those not participating in the causative alternation in English (e.g., kieru/kesu “disappear/be disappeared” and todoku/todokeru “deliver/be delivered”), are lexically causative, in addition to the prototypical causative verbs such as aku/akeru “open” and ugoku/ugokasu “move”. This asymmetric relationship forms a gap between the L1 and L2 and will cause overgeneralization errors in the L2 utterances. In this study, 44 native speakers of English and 60 Japanese ESL learners participated in the grammaticality judgment tasks in a series of experiments. The data show that the negative transfer exists in the inherently-directed motion verbs and verbs of disappearance, but it is conditioned by the frequency of verbs. The existence of frequency effect on verbs in the asymmetric relationship indicates that certain classes of verbs must be learned from the input.

Keywords: Japanese, syntax-semantic interface, lexical causative
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Causative Alternation in English and Japanese
    • 2.1Causative Alternation in English
    • 2.2Lexical causativity in Japanese
    • 2.3Comparison of lexical causativity between English and Japanese
  • 3.Asymmetric relationship in SLA
  • 4.Frequency effect
    • 4.1Frequency effects on language acquisition
    • 4.2Frequency effects and Zipf’s Law
  • 5.Research questions
  • 6.Methodology of Experiment 1
    • 6.1Participants
    • 6.2English Proficiency
    • 6.3Stimuli
    • 6.4Research design
  • 7.Results of Experiment 1 (Mixed-design ANOVA)
  • 8.Methodology of Experiment 2
  • 9.Results of Experiment 2 (Analysis using the Mixed-effect Linear Model)
  • 10.Discussion
  • 11.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Appendix
  • References
Published online: 24 July 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.5.3.02nag
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