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

Abstract

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

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ORCID for Roumyana Slabakova: orcid.org/0000-0002-5839-460X

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