The Bottleneck Hypothesis in second language acquisition: A study of L1 Norwegian speakers's knowledge of syntax and morphology in L2 English

Jensen, Isabel Nadine, Slabakova, Roumyana and Westergaard, Marit (2017) The Bottleneck Hypothesis in second language acquisition: A study of L1 Norwegian speakers's knowledge of syntax and morphology in L2 English. In BUCLD 41: Proceedings of the 41st annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. vol. 41, Cascadilla Press. 14 pp .

Abstract

The Bottleneck Hypothesis (Slabakova, 2008; 2013) aims to partially answer the question of why certain properties of language are harder or easier to acquire in a second language (L2). Based on a comparison of the different linguistic modules, the hypothesis holds that functional morphology is the bottleneck and consequently, the most challenging part of L2 acquisition. It is argued that the reason for this is, first, that differences between languages are located in functional morphology, i.e., what is known as the Borer–Chomsky Conjecture (Baker, 2008; Chomsky, 1995); secondly, that functional morphology bundles a variety of semantic, syntactic and morphophonological features which affect the acceptability and the meaning of the whole sentence. Feature Reassembly (Lardiere, 2009) and mismatches in feature realization are responsible for most of the acquisition challenges.
The study presented in this article tests the predictions of the Bottleneck Hypothesis by investigating L1 Norwegian speakers’ knowledge of core syntax and functional morphology in L2 English. It is predicted that Norwegian learners make fewer errors with syntactic operations than with functional morphology, and that knowledge of core syntax improves faster than knowledge of functional morphology as the speakers become more advanced.
We tested two constructions that do not match in English and Norwegian: subject–verb agreement, obligatory in the L2, and Verb-Second (V2) word order, obligatory in the L1. The former represents knowledge of functional morphology and the latter knowledge of syntax. This is the first experimental study designed to directly test the hypothesis. To anticipate our main finding, participants experienced more challenges with agreement than with verb movement, as they were had trouble identifying ungrammatical agreement. This lack of sensitivity was established not only at the lower proficiency levels, but also among the more advanced speakers. In addition, there was a stronger correlation between verb movement and proficiency scores than between agreement and proficiency scores. This fact suggests that learners develop considerably faster in their knowledge of English verb movement. We conclude that our findings lend support to the Bottleneck Hypothesis.

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Contributors

Author: Roumyana Slabakova

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