A feature-based contrastive approach to the L2 acquisition of specificity

This study examined the acquisition of the Russian indefinite determiners (kakoj-to 'which-to' and kakoj-nibud' 'which-nibud') encoding scopal specificity by English and Korean native speakers within the feature-based contrastive framework (Lardiere 2008, 2009). The specific...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Cho, Jacee (Author), Slabakova, Roumyana (Author)
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: 2017-06-01.
Subjects:
Online Access:Get fulltext
LEADER 01560 am a22001333u 4500
001 378846
042 |a dc 
100 1 0 |a Cho, Jacee  |e author 
700 1 0 |a Slabakova, Roumyana  |e author 
245 0 0 |a A feature-based contrastive approach to the L2 acquisition of specificity 
260 |c 2017-06-01. 
856 |z Get fulltext  |u https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/378846/1/Cho-Slabakova-AL-accepted.docx 
520 |a This study examined the acquisition of the Russian indefinite determiners (kakoj-to 'which-to' and kakoj-nibud' 'which-nibud') encoding scopal specificity by English and Korean native speakers within the feature-based contrastive framework (Lardiere 2008, 2009). The specificity markers kakoj-to and kakoj-nibud' are reflections of different values of three major nominal features definiteness, scopal specificity, and referentiality. The learning task for each functional item differs with respect to mapping and re-configuration of the feature combinations. Our experimental data suggest that the morpheme kakoj-to was acquired early since English (some) and Korean (eotteon 'some') have the corresponding morphemes with the same featural representation as the Russian kakoj-to. The morpheme kakoj-nibud' presented a greater difficulty since its featural make-up is not overtly realized in English or Korean, that is, learners had to re-assemble the target feature set. Such developmental patterns provide evidence that feature re-assembly poses a challenge in second language acquisition. On the basis of the findings, pedagogical implications are discussed 
655 7 |a Article