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Meaning and Structure in Second Language Acquisition: In honor of Roumyana Slabakova
Edited by Jacee Cho, Michael Iverson, Tiffany Judy, Tania Leal and Elena Shimanskaya
[Studies in Bilingualism 55] 2018
► pp. 3–34

Chapter 1
Testing the morphological congruency effect in offline comprehension

L2 Russian Genitive of Negation

 | University of Wisconsin-Madison
The Morphological Congruency Hypothesis states that non-target-like production or comprehension of L2 functional morphology is due to problems in activating L2 grammatical meanings that are not morphologically marked in L1 (Jiang, 2004, 2007). The present study examines whether the hypothesis holds true in L2 offline performance by comparing L1-English and L1-Korean speakers’ offline comprehension of the L2 Russian Genitive of Negation encoding specificity in negative sentences. Specificity under negation is morphologically encoded in Russian and Korean but not in English. In an acceptability judgment task, however, L1-English and L1-Korean speakers have shown similar judgment patterns. These results suggest that morphological congruency may not have the same effect in offline performance as in online performance.
Keywords: Morphological Congruency Hypothesis, Russian Genitive of Negation, specificity, L2 functional morphology
Article outline
  • Theoretical background
    • Specificity in the scope of negation
  • Crosslinguistic analysis of grammaticalization of specificity
    • Grammaticalization of specificity in Russian: Genitive of negation
    • Grammaticalization of specificity in Korean: Two forms of negation
  • The study
    • Research questions
    • Methodology
      • Participants
      • Instruments and procedures
  • Results
    • Data analysis
    • Native controls
    • L1-English L2-Russian learners
    • L1-Korean L2-Russian learners
  • Discussion and conclusions
    • Native speaker data: Discrepancy between theory and empirical data
    • L2 Learner data
      • RQ 1. Do L1-English speakers, whose L1 is morphologically incongruent with L2 Russian with respect to scopal specificity, differentiate between accusative object NPs and genitive object NPs in L2 Russian in their offline comprehension?
      • RQ 2. Do L1-Korean speakers, whose L1 is morphologically congruent with L2 Russian with respect to scopal specificity differentiate between accusative object NPs and genitive object NPs in L2 Russian in their offline comprehension?
      • RQ 3. What is the role of proficiency in overcoming the morphological congruency effect in offline performance?
  • Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 16 November 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/sibil.55.01cho
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