What is it about?
This paper reports on an experiment which examined the knowledge of verb placement by Japanese learners of English (JLEs). The results of a sentence matching task showed that no JLE group clearly differentiated the +/-V-raising word orders in terms of their matching speed for both the present and the past tense contexts. The results are interpreted to indicate the possibility that JLEs may learn the overt word order facts, but never end up with the same grammatical representation of V-raising parameter as native speakers.
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Why is it important?
The overall results of this study support the L2 acquisition hypotheses which argue for some impairment of grammatical features in second language acquisition.
Perspectives
Whether the Verb Raising Parameter (+/- V-raising) is relevant in the participants' L1 (i.e., Japanese), the results indicate that seemingly apparent grammatical properties like word order can be still problematic. These results also suggest the difficulty of acquiring uninterpretable grammatical features especially when learners can make sense of the sentences without actually acquiring such grammatical features.
Dr Masanori Bannai
Tohoku Gakuin University
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This page is a summary of: L2 knowledge of verb placement by Japanese learners of English, IRAL - International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, April 2008, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/iral.2008.001.
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