Lexicon Syntax Interface in Second Language Acquisition (Language Acquisition and Language...

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The LexiconSyntax Interface in Second Language Aquisition


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Language Acquisition & Language Disorders

Volumes in this series provide a forum for research contributing to theories of

language acquistion (first and second, child and adult), language learnability,

language attrition and language disorders.

Series Editors

Harald ClahsenUniversity of Essex

Lydia WhiteMcGill University

Editorial Board

Melissa F. Bowerman

Max Planck Institut fr Psycholinguistik, Nijmegen

Katherine DemuthBrown University

Wolfgang U. DresslerUniversitt Wien

Nina HyamsUniversity of California at Los Angeles

Jrgen M. Meisel

Universitt Hamburg

William OGradyUniversity of Hawaii

Mabel RiceUniversity of Kansas

Luigi Rizzi

University of Siena

Bonnie D. SchwartzUniversity of Hawaii at Manao

Antonella SoraceUniversity of Edinburgh

Karin StromswoldRutgers University

Jrgen WeissenbornUniversitt Potsdam

Frank WijnenUtrecht University

Volume 30

The LexiconSyntax Interface in Second Language Aquisition

Edited by Roeland van Hout, Aafke Hulk, Folkert Kuiken and Richard Towell


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The LexiconSyntax Interfacein Second Language Aquisition

Edited by

Roeland van Hout

University of Nijmegen

Aafke Hulk

University of Amsterdam

Folkert Kuiken

University of Amsterdam

Richard Towell

University of Salford

John Benjamins Publishing Company

Amsterdam/Philadelphia


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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements8

TM

of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanenceof Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The lexiconsyntax interface in second language aquisition / edited by Roeland

van Hout, Aafke Hulk, Folkert Kuiken and Richard Towell.

p. cm. (Language Acquisition and Language Disorders, issn

09250123 ; v. 30)Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Second language acquisition. 2. Grammar, Comparative and

general--Syntax. 3. Lexicology. I. Title: Lexicon-syntax interface in 2nd language

acquisition. II. Hout, Roeland van. III. Series.

P118.2.L49 2003418-dc21 2003051906

isbn 90 272 2499 4 (Eur.) / 1 58811 418 X (US) (Hb; alk. paper)

2003 John Benjamins B.V.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or

any other means, without written permission from the publisher.

John Benjamins Publishing Co. P.O. Box 36224 1020 me Amsterdam The Netherlands

John Benjamins North America P.O. Box 27519 Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 usa


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Table of contents

Acknowledgments vii

1. Introduction: Second language acquisition research in search of

an interface 1

Richard Towell

2. Locating the source of defective past tense marking in advanced

L2 English speakers 21

Roger Hawkins and Sarah Liszka

3. Perfect projections 45

Norbert Corver

4. L1 features in the L2 output 69

Ineke van de Craats

5. Measures of competent gradience 97

Nigel Duffield

6. Lexical storage and retrieval in bilinguals 129

Ton Dijkstra

7. Inducing abstract linguistic representations: Human and

connectionist learning of noun classes 151John N. Williams

8. Neural substrates of representation and processing of a second

language 175

Laura Sabourin and Marco Haverkort

9. Neural basis of lexicon and grammar in L2 acquisition:

The convergence hypothesis 197

David W. Green

10. The interface: Concluding remarks 219

Roeland van Hout, Aafke Hulk and Folkert Kuiken


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vi Table of contents

Name index 227

Subject index 229


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Acknowledgments

This volume contains a selection of papers presented at the NWCL/LOT Expert

Seminar on The interface between syntax and the lexicon in second language

acquisition, held in Amsterdam on March 3031, 2001. The seminar was

organized by the editors of this volume. We want to thank the participants of

the seminar for reviewing the papers submitted for this volume. We are verygrateful to the following institutions for financial support: the North West

Centre for Linguistics (NWCL), the Landelijke Onderzoekschool Taalweten-

schap (LOT; Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics) and from the

University of Amsterdam: the Amsterdam Center for Language and Com-

munication (ACLC), the Chair of Linguistics of the Romance Languages and

the Chair of Second Language Acquisition.

February 2003,

The editors


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Chapter 1

Introduction

Second language acquisition research

in search of an interface

Richard TowellUniversity of Salford

1. Introduction

If it is to attain its eventual goal, second language acquisition research has to

integrate the totality of second language acquisition processes. These must

include the learning of the core syntax of a second language, the learning of the

lexical items and determining the role of the cognitive mechanisms which are

necessary for the use of linguistic forms in comprehension and production.It has been accepted for a long time that these three domains involve

different kinds of learning: syntax is learnt through a process of implementing

a particular set of universal structures (Chomsky 1986, White 1989); lexis is

learnt by establishing a set of arbitrary associations which operate in a given

society (Waxman 1996); comprehension and production are reliant on general

cognitive procedures (Harley 2001). The learning of syntax is often character-

ised as a process of triggering (Sakas and J.D. Fodor 2001); the learning of lexis

is characterised by the building up of associations (or connections) (Schreuder

and Weltens 1993); comprehension and production are learnt by establishing

and practising the required procedures (Pinker 1997).

However, these three systems must come together in the creation of a whole

linguistic capacity in the mind of an individual. The syntax will govern the

structure of the grammar but the lexical items will govern how the structure is

implemented. The linguistic knowledge which results from the interaction of these

two systems can only develop and then find expression through the cognitive

mechanisms associated with language comprehension and production.

The researchers who attempt to provide accounts of the processes and

outcomes of second language acquisition (SLA) are generally all too aware,


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2 Richard Towell

therefore, that they have set themselves an ambitious, interdisciplinary task.

Ideally, as a group, they wish to account for all aspects of second language

acquisition from the phonetic to the intercultural (see Mitchell and Myles 1998).

In particular, they set themselves the task of explaining those factors which havelong been recognised as specific to the acquisition of a second or foreign

language as opposed to the mother tongue. These are usually identified as

transfer or cross-linguistic influence, evidence of a specifiable route of acquisi-

tion regardless of first language background, variability (also known as option-

ality) in the language of individual learners, and incompleteness or fossilisation

in the final state of the majority of acquirers (Towell and Hawkins 1994).

Clearly no one researcher could ever hope to deal with all aspects. At

different times, the nature of the activities which are being described has led tothe involvement of scholars from disciplines ranging from acoustics to anthro-

pology. The central disciplines involved have, however, always been linguistics

and psychology. For what now seems a brief period in the 1950s, linguistics and

psychology came together to provide what was then thought of as a complete

description of what language was and how it was learned: a powerful combina-

tion of structuralist linguistics and behaviourist psychology (Gass and Selinker

2001). Unfortunately, this period is only talked about in todays classes on

second language acquisition in order to show how misguided both of these

initiatives were, forgetting rather that, despite the radical shifts of views which

have followed, these efforts laid the foundations of the disciplines within which

we all situate our research.

It is probably true to say that linguistics and psychology began to follow

different routes after the devastating criticisms of Skinners (1957) Verbal

Behaviourput forward by Chomsky (1959), although many psychologists still

continued to attempt to interpret transformational theory in psychological

terms. These attempts foundered as the derivational theory of complexity (the

belief that the more complex transformations were, the longer they would take

to process) was denied by linguists. Linguists pointed out that, although terms

like least effort and economy were essential to their endeavours, they were

not defined with regard to processing effort but in relation to linguistic simplic-

ity: Chomskys economy principles are unambiguously matters of competence,

in that they pertain to representations and derivations internal to the language

faculty and exclude relations beyond the interfaces (Smith 1999:114). Main-taining this position, linguists have gone on to develop their discipline significantly

but within the boundaries which they have seen as necessary. They have therefore

done so with little reference to any insights from psychology. Mainstream


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In search of an interface 3

generative linguists have focused on syntax. That mainstream focus provides the

background for the articles by Hawkins and Liszka, Corver, Van de Craats and

Duffield in this volume.

However, during the same period, the study of language within psychologyalso made rapid strides in exploring many aspects of psycholinguistics (see

Harley 2001). One of these has concentrated on the lexicon, as is demonstrated

in the chapters by Dijkstra and Williams in this volume; others have explored

issues of how language may be stored in the brain and have made use of

imaging techniques to enable us to begin to relate our theoretical analyses to

physical realities (Perani et al. 1996, Dewaele 2002). These are represented in

this volume by the chapters by Sabourin and Haverkort and by Green. There

has been the occasional fruitful interchange in some areas of the discipline fromtime to time but there has been no real examination of how the two disciplines

have evolved with regard to SLA and whether there are more global reasons for

looking towards collaboration. There are now signs that both groups of

researchers are coming to an understanding that their particular view of the

world may not suffice to account for the overall process and that each will have

to understand more about what the other knows.

Whilst this book does not pretend to complete that task, it will seek to

present current examples of the way linguists think about second language

acquisition and of the way researchers working within a more psychological

frame of reference think about the same subject in such a way as to show how

there is a degree of complementarity in the work being done, even if, at the

highest levels of argument, we are unlikely to see a swift return to the unity of

view of the 1950s (cf. Smith 1999:174).

The belief that the time is right to seek such complementarity is encouraged

by two fairly recent developments. Within linguistics, the advent of the mini-

malist theory and its consequences for SLA has caused researchers to look again

at the relative roles of syntax and lexis. Under the minimalist view which, as

Corver demonstrates in chapter three, applies as much to interlanguages as to

any other natural languages, syntax is thought to be universal. It is constituted

of invariant principles with options restricted to functional elements and

general properties of the lexicon (Chomsky 1995:170). The invariant nature of

the syntax is possible because the functional elements are now seen as part of

the lexicon: It is clear that the lexicon contains substantive elements (nouns,verbs) And it is reasonably clear that it contains some functional catego-

ries. (Chomsky 1995:240). More recently, SLA specialists (Hawkins 2001:345,

Herschensohn 2000:80) have stated rather more firmly that, under minimalism,


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4 Richard Towell

functional categories should be seen as part of the lexicon. We will argue below

that this change of emphasis Smith (1999) argues cogently that minimalism

is a natural evolution of the generativist enterprise rather than a revolution

may well modify the way in which linguists have to think about development inSLA and indeed about the other central features of SLA research outlined above.

Within psychology, there has been a welcome renewal of interest in how

second languages are acquired. Since the mid 1980s, we have seen attempts to

account for second language learning drawing on a rich vein of inductive

research using computer modelling (Rumelhart and McClelland 1986). More

recently, a variety of non-intrusive ways of providing physical evidence of brain

processes have become available (Perani 1999). Both linguists and psychologists

have become interested in how knowledge is stored in the mind and how it isretrieved from storage. Arguments have been put forward based on a distinc-

tion between declarative and procedural memory systems (Towell and Hawkins

1994, Ullman 2001) some of which suggest radical differences in the way first

and second languages are acquired and stored in the mind. Most recently,

arguments have been put forward to suggest that usage-based analyses can

account for all linguistic units: Psycholinguistic and cognitive linguistic

theories of language acquisition hold that all linguistic units are abstracted from

language use. In these usage based perspectives, the acquisition of grammar is

the piecemeal learning of many thousands of constructions and the frequency-

biased abstraction of regularities within them (Ellis 2002: 144). All of this adds

to the view that a full account of second language acquisition will require

complementary input from both disciplines.

One of the main keys must lie in how we see the concept of development

and the psychological mechanisms which underlie development. The efforts of

syntacticians focus on describing the syntactic structure which lies behind the

interlanguage of the learner. This has always made it difficult for them to

account for development (see Gregg 1996): the placing of functional categories

within the lexicon makes this difficulty more acute. The invariant syntactic

knowledge which learners have is a template present in the mind of the learner

which can be modified by the information inserted within it. There cannot be

a driving force for development in the syntax. It follows therefore that that

driving force really comes from the lexis. However, up to now the learning of

lexis has been thought of mainly in terms of one or other forms of associationistlearning theory, with connectionism being the most powerful. Theorists

pursuing this model have tended to argue that connectionist learning can

account for the totality of language learning, including the learning of syntax


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(see quotation from Ellis (2002) above). But syntacticians cannot accept that

the sophisticated structures which they observe and which provide no visible

clues on the surface structure of the language can be learnt in this empirical

fashion. They claim instead that innate knowledge (mediated or not by the L1)must be guiding the learning (Hawkins 2001).

It is not clear that this argument can be resolved by theoretical debates

between nativists and non-nativists. We need to examine in detail the

evidence of how learners acquire a second language. This evidence must come

from a variety of sources using a variety of techniques. It will take us into

questions of what it is that learners acquire, how they acquire it and how that

process modifies their linguistic capacity in both knowledge and use. Hawkins,

Corver and Van de Craats in this volume present clear empirical accounts ofhow specific features of syntactic and lexical knowledge play a fundamental role

in second language development. Their accounts cannot, however, tell us

everything we need to know about the mental processes involved. Duffield asks

fundamental questions about the nature of the competence which is acquired.

Dijkstra provides an account of the way in which bilinguals store and access

their knowledge. Williams examines the way in which linguistic knowledge may be

built up on the basis of distributional evidence. Sabourin and Haverkort and then

Green look at the way in which the knowledge may be stored and used. In this way

we can see that a full account of the acquisition of a second language involves

the three systems outlined at the beginning of this chapter. We will argue that

none of the current arguments will suffice alone to account for the total process

and that it is essential to attempt to integrate the sources of knowledge available

to us (see Jackendoff (2002) for a similarly motivated position).

In this chapter we shall seek first to outline the research context from the

generativist point of view, initially in general, and then specifically with regard

to the contribution of minimalism. We will then examine in more detail the

contribution of psychological research and seek to show how a degree of

complementarity may well exist, if there is the will to look for it. In this way, we

are seeking to provide a context for the more detailed studies which figure in

the rest of the volume by means of which the value of their contribution can be

seen against the background of the evolving discipline of SLA research.


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endowment is what enables the child to know more than the surface of the

language reveals: the surface forms act only as a trigger for the underlying

knowledge which the child already possesses.

It is important to highlight four significant aspects of this theoreticalposition as these will give rise to further comment below and will be dealt with

in subsequent chapters. First, a generativist approach involves idealisation of

the data to be examined. For the study of adult competence in the mother

tongue the researcher can frequently consult his or her own linguistic knowl-

edge as a representative sample of the idealised speech community. This is not

possible in second language research. SLA research requires data gathering

methods which can isolate linguistic competence from performance factors.

Second, the primacy of syntax within the generative paradigm has led to aseparation between syntax and semantics. This is not without its problems as

more and more researchers are finding that semantic factors influence syntactic

phenomena (Juffs 1998, 2001). Duffield in this volume is concerned with how

competence can be successfully defined within this paradigm and proposes that

it is necessary to conceive of competence at two levels, one of which is more

related to the surface structures of language. Third, the conception of the

acquisition of syntactic knowledge through a process of triggering has given rise

to debate (Lightfoot 1993, Carroll 2000, Sakas and J.D. Fodor 2001). Hawkins,

Corver and Van de Craats, through an examination of the acquisition of

syntactic and lexical features, define more clearly the nature of the features

which have to be learnt and discuss the role of the L1 in providing the initial

knowledge. This might provide a more satisfactory conceptual basis at least with

regard to the initial state. It does, however, leave open the question of how the

learners use empirical evidence to move to subsequent states. Fourth, the

generativist position for SLA has to adapt to the fact that a second language

acquirer has already learnt one language. The issue of how learners transfer or

access universal knowledge in cases where one language has already been learnt

is one which may have to be looked at again within the minimalist paradigm.

This is an issue for Hawkins and Liszka, for Corver, and for Van de Craats.

2.2 Generativist second language research

The particular strength of this approach has been in providing syntacticanalyses within a theoretical framework. This enabled SLA researchers to

predict in a precise way what learners needed to acquire in order to develop

their interlanguage system. During the 1990s, this was manifested mainly


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2.2.1 The minimalist perspective

There are several important differences between the principles and parameters

(P and P) model of syntax and the minimalist version. The most important one

is the claim that the syntax is invariant and that the morpholexical system is thesource of all variation. This has important implications for second language

researchers. Herschensohn (1999) argues convincingly that minimalism should

be better able to account for all of the main features of second language

acquisition as defined above. It will be better at dealing with the area where it

has always been most successful viz transfer but it should also be in a position

to give a better account of the route of learning, incompleteness and variability

(optionality). The problem with the P and P model was that it was all or

nothing: either the parameter had been re-set and all features fell into place or

it had not and they did not. As pointed out above, investigations based on this

theory tended to find that partial re-setting took place, but the theory itself

could not account for partiality given that the re-setting process was one of

switch-flipping. The notion contained within minimalism that acquisition

proceeds more through the gradual building of L2 grammar through the

control of morpholexical constructions (Herschensohn 1999:81) allows for

learners to be aware of the need to apply certain features or categories in some

circumstances but not others.

Hawkins (2001) and Hawkins and Liszka in this volume would probably

agree that the minimalist approach opens the door to a more satisfactory

account of variability (optionality) and incompleteness, but they base their

arguments more on the presence or absence of features in the functional

categories of the L2 than on the build up of constructions. Hawkins and Liszka

also set out a specific view on the relationship between the L1 and the L2. They

show that Chinese learners learning English do not mark tense consistently.

Having investigated and rejected a range of alternative proposals, Hawkins and

Liszka argue that this is likely to be because Chinese learners are unable to

establish that the functional category English T is specified for +/- past. They

suggest, furthermore, that this feature is not available to the learners because it

does not exist in their first language. They claim that where parametrised

syntactic features are not present in a speakers L1, they will not be accessible in

later L2 acquisition. Such a point of view, if substantiated, would argue against

full transfer from the L1 and would substantiate the partial access hypothesis. Inthe presentation of the article, Hawkins and Liszka contrast their account with

that of Lardiere who adopts a full access point of view. Lardieres explanation is

that the evidence suggests a failure of mapping from one component within the


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perception of language forms. How the learners trigger their knowledge or how

they perceive the differences is something which cannot easily be dealt with

within generative linguistics as currently defined, because it is more related to

performance than competence. As soon as we mention perception we need toreturn to the psychological dimension and look again at second language

acquisition from that perspective.

3. The psychological dimension

It is probably as well to recognise immediately that the issues which divided

linguists and psychologists fifty years ago have not gone away. Mainstreamlinguists still work within a rationalist framework which contrasts with the

psychologists emphasis on empiricism. Linguists tend to reason on a top-down

basis, psychologists base their theories on bottom-up evidence. Linguists believe

in an innate, biological endowment specific to language; psychologists believe

that language learning is one manifestation of cognition amongst others.

Linguists believe that language is a symbolic system; some psychologists, at least,

believe that it can be accounted for without the use of symbols. Linguists tend to

reject computer modelling; many psychologists rely on computer modelling.

Despite these differences, the argument that is being developed in this

chapter (and which is the justification for this book) is that these differences

actually provide us with perspectives which are complementary rather than

contradictory, if we choose to look for the areas where insights from one field

can contribute to the other (see Hulstijn 2002 for a similarly motivated view).

Indeed, the fact that each field has excluded the domains covered by the other

discipline surely leads to a position where significant aspects of the total process

of SLA as described in Section 1 cannot be dealt with except by reference to the

other discipline.

It is therefore important to look more closely at the methods and results of

psycholinguistic research in order to establish where the complementarity may

lie. In order to do so we will now situate the articles in the book which have

adopted a psychological reference point within the development of the method-

ologies used in psycholinguistics.

Psychologists interested in language have made use of a variety of methods,many of which are shared with other branches of cognitive psychology. The

three most important of these are experimental investigations which rely on the

measurement of reaction times against a theoretically predicted outcome; the


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12 Richard Towell

use of physical measurements of brain activity; and computer simulations of

speaker or learner behaviour. Psychologists apply these methods to a variety of

L1 and L2 speakers and to patients whose language ability is impaired in some

way e.g. aphasics. All of these are represented in papers in this volume.Dijkstras article provides an excellent illustration of two out of the three

methodologies typically encountered in the psycholinguistic literature. The

problem space he addresses is whether bilinguals in possession of words from

different languages (under his definition this includes language learners as

unbalanced bilinguals) access both sets automatically in response to a given

stimulus or whether one or the other is primed by different contexts or presen-

tation methods. His stimuli include words which are cognates (similar in both

form and meaning in the two languages), homographs (similar in orthographicform but not in meaning) and homophones (similar in sound but not in

orthographic form or meaning). In a series of experiments Dijkstra and his

colleagues have shown that bilinguals cannot do otherwise than access the items

in both of their languages when presented with an applicable stimulus of

isolated words (they call this nonselective access). They have also shown that

frequency of use is the main determinant: highly automatised L1 words are

accessed more swiftly than L2 words. But they have also shown that both items

remain activated for a relatively long time before language selection takes place.

Dijkstra also reports on a (limited) number of studies which examine words in

sentential contexts by the measurement of Event Related brain Potentials

(ERPs) through EEGs. The results have suggested that there are significant

differences in the way bilinguals process their second language. Those related to

semantic aspects seem quantitativein nature whilst those related to the syntax have

a qualitative dimension as well, showing differences amongst early and late second

language learners. Such studies, if replicated, could have considerable impact on

the critical age hypothesis which is essential to some of the generative hypothe-

ses, such as the general blocking principle discussed by Hawkins and Liszka.

The study by Williams in this volume makes use at least in part of the third

methodology regularly exploited by psycholinguists: computer modelling.

Psychologists from Winograd (1972) onwards have been keen to exploit the

processing abilities of computers for the purposes of modelling human behav-

iour. The most recent manifestation is connectionism which has been exten-

sively (and controversially) used to model language and language learning.Connectionism (Bechtel and Abrahamsen 1991) attempts to show that many

apparently complex processes can, in fact, be accounted for in a relatively

simple way as long as the processing involved can be very large in quantitative


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terms and can operate in parallel (it is also known as parallel distributed

processing or PDP). The basic idea is to have (a large number of) processing

units which feed into one another at several levels (some of which are hidden)

in sequence. The units involved can be given levels of activation or weightingprior to any simulation. These may be random or specified in relation to the

outcome envisaged. This will vary according to whether the model is being used

simply to replicate what is assumed to happen in certain forms of processing or

whether it is intended to model a developmental process (such as language

learning). In the former case, random levels will be initially assigned and it will

be intended that during the simulation the model will learn new levels of

activation. It is hoped that these levels of activation will represent eventually

some kind of reality. Put (over-)simply, the lowest level or input units are thengiven different levels of activation and these levels feed through to the higher

levels. Where the interaction with higher levels is facilitated because certain

units at those levels already have positive activation (excitation), the signal

transmitted will be strengthened. Where the level of input activation encounters

negative activation at a higher level, it will be inhibited and, in the longer term,

weakened. Over very many trials, the simulation establishes a stable level of

output activation which is in essence derived through parallel processing from

the relative frequency of the input it has received. This is arrived at through

differentiated interaction between signals at the intermediate levels on the basis

of the processes of strengthening and weakening.

In a simulated task learning context, models can be modified in such a way

as to include information about the extent to which the model is performing as

it should in relation to some target (back-propagation). This means that the

model can be trained to move nearer over time to a specified target. Researchers

can then see how the model responds to the information it has been given and

if and how it can progress towards the target. It should be noted that this

model only has one kind of unit which is linked to the signal strength of the

connections: there is no symbolic level within connectionist models. The

researchers can inspect the intermediate levels to see what activation levels the

model produced at different times, they will be aware of different stages of

learning and they will see the extent to which the desired outcome is obtained

and the relation with the input given.

There is no doubt that theorising alone cannot discover the effect ofenormous quantities of parallel processing and the computer is very efficient at

examining this effect. The sixty thousand dollar question, however, is whether

such modelling really reflects anything which goes on in the human brain.


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14 Richard Towell

Those who favour this kind of modelling argue that it parallels human learning,

that it can generalise beyond the data set which it is given and that it can

produce knowledge which is equivalent to what other approaches consider to

be abstract knowledge. It then follows naturally that proponents of this worksee no need for abstract symbolic categories in the mind because, from their

point of view, these are only the outcomes of the parallel processing described

above, not primitive units.

Numerous articles in the mid 1980s emanating from the PDP group led by

Rumelhart and McClelland (Rumelhart, McClelland and the PDP Research

Group 1986) made very strong claims about the way in which their network

could parallel human language learning. These drew a detailed response,

notably from Pinker and Prince (1988), in which the claims were thrown intoquestion. As Fodor and Pylyshyn put it: Pinker and Prince argue (in effect)

that more must be going on in learning past tense morphology than merely

estimating correlations since the statistical hypothesis provides neither a close

fit to the ontogenic data nor a plausible account of the adult data on which the

ontogenic processes converge. It seems to us that Pinker and Prince have, by

quite a lot, the best of this argument. (Fodor and Pylyshyn 1988:68). Connec-

tionists have, however, gone on to refine their models and to enable them to call

on other sets of information through which they have renewed their claim to

model language.

These are the issues which are interestingly explored in the study by

Williams. He is critically interested in whether the learning which can be

demonstrated by computer modelling really models that of humans or not. To

investigate this, he combines computer-based simulations with experimental

investigations on humans. The context of learning is that of the specification of

abstract noun classes on the basis of a gender type classification. We already

know that there is considerable evidence available to show that second language

learners fail to assign gender in the consistent way that native speakers do.

There are two central issues. The first is whether computer based inductive

processes can genuinely be said to have gone beyond exemplar based generali-

sations to the creation of abstract classes. The second is whether what computers

do and what humans do is in fact similar. Computers may very well demonstrate

a remarkable ability to generalise from distributional examples, but do humans

do the same? Do they rely on many examples to induce classes or do theyinduce classes in other ways, such as by making use of other clues e.g. animacy?

Williams first simulation of the training kind with feedback seemed to

show that the computer-based learning could generate productive knowledge


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of noun classes which enabled the network to generalise beyond the trained

exemplars. It could behave as if it had formed abstract representations. His

second simulation which did not involve feedback in the same way did not

learn as well. Humans who learnt to classify the data into noun classes at 66%or above seemed to be using conscious explicit strategies, which clearly were not

available to the computers, and/or to be influenced by prior knowledge of

gender languages, equally not true of the computers. The conclusions which

may be drawn are not simple: it seems as if some aspects of human behaviour

may be similar to the inductive generalising of computers but that humans

make use of other devices as well. Once feedback is introduced computer

learning is considerably more powerful, but then it is probably more powerful

than the human mind.Green and Sabourin and Haverkort take us into yet other areas of psycho-

linguistic research. Their concern is with how linguistic knowledge may be

represented and stored in the mind. They share many reference points and to

some extent a methodology. They both discuss evidence based on aphasics, they

both rely on physiological evidence from ERPs to confirm or deny what other

sources have indicated. Their conclusions appear to be slightly different.

The broader argument which this research addresses concerns whether or

not L1 and L2 learners acquire and store language in the same way. Virtually all

researchers acknowledge the differences in learning environment for many L2

learners: they are generally older (beyond the so-called critical age) with fully

developed memory and cognitive systems; they are often literate; they are

already in possession of a first language and they are often exposed to explana-

tions about language in classrooms as well as to language forms in more or less

authentic contexts of use. A key question has always been: do these differences

mean that they will learn in a different way? Those who argue that they do

suggest that they rely more on explicit learning and that this will be reflected in

the way their knowledge is stored in the mind. A separation is often made between

declarative knowledge, sometimes glossed as knowing that, the kind of knowl-

edge which can be consciously accessed and articulated, such as a rule of grammar,

and procedural knowledge, sometime glossed as knowing how i.e. the kind of

knowledge which underlies skill activity, such as riding a bicycle, which cannot

be consciously accessed. The two forms of knowledge are said to be acquired in

different ways and stored in two different memories: a declarative memory anda procedural memory each of which is accessed in a different way (Anderson

1983, 1993, 2000). Declarative knowledge is acquired explicitly, consciously

and quickly but cannot be used swiftly as a basis for any skill based action.


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16 Richard Towell

Procedural knowledge is acquired implicitly, unconsciously and slowly by dint

of a lot of practice. It is available swiftly in response to an appropriate stimulus.

The argument has been put that L1 acquisition may be implicit and procedural

and L2 acquisition may be explicit and declarative, although most researcherswho discuss this issue allow for some overlap and some movement between

categories over time as learners become more proficient and make their

knowledge more automatic. Researchers such as Paradis (1997), however,

claim categorically that explicit knowledge cannot become implicit.

Greens article questions the necessity for a separation between declarative

and procedural memory and queries the evidence from aphasics on which he

believes it is based. Computer modelling has indicated that the data derived

from the aphasic experiments does not depend on having two memories. Hetherefore argues that it is worth looking at physiological evidence to see whether

it confirms the necessity of two memory systems and whether there is evidence

to suggest that L2 learners store knowledge in this differentiated way. His

interpretation of the available evidence suggests that there is no difference for

proficient L2 learners and he suggests that if there is a difference in the early

stages of learning it soon disappears. Only longitudinal studies which included

physiological studies could settle this argument conclusively.

Sabourin and Haverkort do not refer explicitly to the two kinds of knowl-

edge or the two memory systems outlined above but they do argue in favour of

a clearer separation between the representation of linguistic knowledge and the

representation of the knowledge which lies behind linguistic processing ability.

This is because they believe that the empirical evidence that they have gathered

by comparing the results obtained when proficient L2 learners are required to

undertake the same grammaticality judgement test off-line and on-line shows

that the knowledge base is different. The results of the off-line task show no

difference between the advanced learners and native speakers but the on-line

results do. When learners do a grammaticality judgement test in a paper and

pencil way, they score as highly as native speakers. But when their performance

on the same task is measured through ERPs, it is revealed that they are not

responding in the same way. For Sabourin and Haverkort, this suggests that

they are not accessing the same knowledge even though the observed outcome

of correct answers is the same.

Green therefore argues that the underlying knowledge base for advancedproficient learners is likely to be the same but Sabourin and Haverkort argue

that it is likely to be different. Both agree that more research is needed.


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4. In what ways can the linguistic and psychological perspective be seen

to be complementary?

In this final section of the chapter, an attempt is made to build on the accountgiven so far and to draw out some of the central themes which are treated in the

following chapters. At the level of principle, as pointed out briefly in Section 3

above, there seems to be nothing but contradiction in the present stance of the

founding disciplines of psycho-linguistics. And yet at a more pragmatic level,

the accounts of the research outlined above suggest that the two disciplines may

need each other rather more than they are prepared to admit. We will briefly

explore this issue by looking at how interlanguages are created and how they

develop bearing in mind the evidence presented in the various articles.Let us start with some notion of the initial state of knowledge for second

language learners. This has to be defined for us by the linguists. In their

chapters they argue cogently that learners transfer the features of lexical and

functional categories from the L1 in ways which make up an operational

interlanguage. Those features which are not available via transfer may be

available through direct access to UG. In those many cases where the languages

differ, the features are not combined in the same bundles as those which are

used by L2 speakers. The task for the learners is then to modify the relationship

between features and forms in such a way as to create over time combinations

which correspond more to the bundles used by speakers of the L2. If they can

create those bundles in an appropriate manner, Universal Grammar will ensure

that they are interpretable by other cognitive systems. There are arguments

about the extent to which the knowledge will transfer, and about the nature of

competence, but the line of the argument is clear.

The next question for second language acquisition researchers is how and

why the necessary modification takes place. The linguists answer is that the

learner must in some way come to know (but not in a conscious way) that the

bundles of features in the interlanguage are not adequate to the purpose of full

communication with native speakers in the L2. Once that unconscious realisa-

tion has taken place, the learner must then have a way of revising the existing

feature bundles to make them correspond more to the L2 bundles. This is said by

the linguists to happen implicitly and without conscious feedback. As was noted

above, the term triggering is one which is frequently used in the literature butit is becoming more and more difficult to accept that what must be a complex

process can adequately be summed up by that term. At this point we really have

to turn to the psychologists to gain some insight into what may be happening.


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22 Roger Hawkins and Sarah Liszka

to be the result of a deficit in the component of the language faculty which

generates inflected phonological word forms: morphology. Beck compared the

reaction times of 31 non-native speakers from a variety of L1 backgrounds with

those of 32 natives on a task requiring the production of past-inflected verbforms. Speakers were presented with verb stems on a computer screen, and

required to produce the simple past tense form orally, which activated a timing

device. In previous studies with natives (e.g. Prasada, Pinker and Snyder 1990)

it had been found that irregular verb forms show a frequency effect: the more

frequent the stem of the verb in question (where frequency is defined as

frequency of occurrence in corpora of English usage) the faster the reaction

time to the past tense form. For regular verbs, however, frequency of the stem

form had no effect on reaction time. Such findings have led to the claim thatirregular past tense verb forms are stored associatively in memory (i.e. are

listed) and hence show frequency effects as a function of strength of associa-

tion between the stem and the listed form. By contrast, regular inflection is

produced by rule, which applies in the same way to all regular stems, indepen-

dently of frequency. Hence there is no reaction time effect.

Becks findings with the non-native speakers were that they performed

similarly to the natives: reaction times on low frequency irregular stems were

slower than on high frequency stems (although not significantly so), and there

was no difference in their performance on frequent and less frequent regular

stems. This led Beck to suggest that it is not the morphological component

which is involved in causing persistent optionality in past tense marking.

Lardiere (1998a, 1998b, 2000) has suggested that the problem for Patty

resides in the mapping between fully specified syntactic phrase markers and

surface morphophonology. Lardiere argues that other evidence from Pattys

spontaneous oral production suggests that she has a T(ense) category specified

for finiteness. Firstly, her use of nominative case-marked pronouns is perfect;

on standard assumptions the nominative case of subjects in English is the result

of an agreement or checking relation between a T category specified [+finite]

and the subject in the specifier of TP. Hence if Patty uses nominative pronouns

perfectly she must have represented a finite feature on T. Secondly, there is no

evidence for thematic verb raising (e.g. over negation) in Pattys productions,

suggesting that she has established that T has weak inflectional properties in

English another piece of evidence that Patty has a T specified for finiteness.Thirdly, there is evidence that Patty projects finite CPs, which on standard

assumptions implies the presence of a T specified for finiteness.

The mapping difficulty is a problem accessing morphological forms which


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Defective past tense marking in L2 English 23

have layers of feature structure. Assuming a model of grammar where an

autonomous morphological component reads the output of lexical and

syntactic derivation, identifying those features which condition inflectional

operations (Lardiere 1998a:20), Lardiere argues that the more inflectionalfeatures there are associated with a morphological form, the more likely a

problem will arise for an L2 speaker. In the case of tense-marking, she assumes

that the output of syntactic computations presents the morphological compo-

nent with a terminal T node specified [+finite]. The morphological component

must then determine whether it is [+past] or [past], and if [+past] select

suppletive forms in the case of irregular verbs, or invoke the regular rule for the

affixation of-edin the case of regular verbs. She proposes (speculatively) that

it is among the increasingly complex outer layer mappings from morphologyto PF that we are likely to find the greatest vulnerability to fossilization and

critical period effects (Lardiere 2000:124). Additionally, if the phonological

forms themselves involve complex phonology for example, involving word

final clusters like -kt, -sktand -mpstin the past tense forms ofwalked, askedand

glimpsed Lardiere argues that this may further affect successful mapping:

We can further imagine that an essentially morphophonological mapping

procedure would be especially vulnerable to derailment from a variety of post-

syntactic or extra-syntactic factors, such as phonological transfer from the L1

(Lardiere 1998a:21). Given that (Mandarin) Chinese is a language with basic

(C)V(nasal) syllable structure and no syllable- or word-final consonant clusters

(Hansen 2001), we can take Lardieres claim to be that while mapping of

phonological forms onto terminal nodes which are the output of the syntax can

cause problems generally for L2 speakers where layers of features are involved,

in Pattys case this is compounded by the fact that the L2 requires word-final

consonant clusters where the L1 disallows them.

The combined results of the studies by Beck and Lardiere point to the

following possible conclusion: a deficit has occurred in one of the mechanisms

of the morphological component the mechanism referred to as the vocabul-

ary in models of distributed morphology (Halle and Marantz 1993, Embick and

Noyer 2001) which inserts vocabulary items (phonological forms) into

terminal nodes where the feature specification of the vocabulary item and the

feature specification of the terminal node are non-distinct. The representation

of morphological forms themselves is not affected (as Becks study suggests), andthe feature specification of categories manipulated by the syntax is not affected, if

Lardieres analysis is correct. Moreover, the difference in phonotactic con-

straints between the L1 and L2 has a persistent influence, such that the mapping


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problem is exacerbated. Thus this account of optionality in tense marking by L2

speakers is located at the interface between syntax and morphology.

In this chapter we test this claim by comparing the spontaneous oral

production of advanced L2 speakers of English from three different L1 back-grounds: Chinese, Japanese and German. If there is a general mapping problem

for L2 speakers at the interface between syntax and morphology involving feature

matching at the point of vocabulary insertion, we would expect this to appear in all

three groups. Since Japanese is similar to Chinese in its phonotactic structure

(disallowing word-final consonant clusters) but German is like English (cf.

word-final clusters such as -ntst: getanzt danced), we would expect mapping

problems to be more marked in the Chinese and Japanese informants.2

In fact we will argue that neither of the predictions is borne out by the data.The Chinese informants do mark simple past tense optionally in oral produc-

tion, as previous studies had found, but the Japanese and German speakers are

significantly less likely to do so. We will also show that our Chinese informants

appear to know the morphological properties of English past tense verb

inflection, as Becks study suggests that they should, and that they do not

generally appear to have problems producing word-final consonant clusters.

This will lead us to argue for a different locus for their deficit: at the interface

between the syntactic component and the lexicon. In particular, we will claim

that the Chinese speakers have difficulty assigning the formal (i.e. syntactically-

relevant) feature [past], which determines the morphophonological forms of

verbs in English, to the feature inventory of the category T(ense) in the lexicon,

because this feature is not selected in Chinese, and is subject to a critical period.

2. Assumptions about the organisation of the language faculty

We follow the spirit of recent work within the minimalist program (Chomsky

1998, 1999, 2001) and assume that the language faculty has a number of

universally fixed and invariant computational procedures, and provides a

universal inventory of phonological, semantic and syntactic (formal) features F

from which lexical items can be assembled. One subset of the computational

procedures is the syntax, which is capable of a small number of empirically and

conceptually necessary operations: merge, agree and move. The syntax takesitems presented to it from the lexicon and combines them into expressions.

These expressions are interpreted by a semantic component (LF) (whose

procedures are themselves universally invariant), and which makes the syntactic


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expressions legible to the conceptual-intentional modules of mind. The

syntactic expressions are also interpreted by morphological/phonological

procedures which are universally uniform, and which make syntactic expres-

sions legible to the sensori-motor systems for the production and understand-ing of speech.

The universal inventory F of semantic, phonological and syntactic features

is crucial in this model, because it is from this set that features are selected for

the assembly of a lexicon whose items provide the input to the computational

procedures. Individual languages select a subset of features from F and assemble

them into lexical items. It is at this point the selection of particular features

for the assembly of lexical items that languages vary.

We focus here on the selection of syntactic (formal) features. Syntacticfeatures are those which initiate syntactic operations, for example, wh-move-

ment, case agreement, N-to-D movement, and so on. Some selections of

syntactic features appear to be obligatory. For example, finite T appears

necessarily to select the syntactic feature required to activate structural nomina-

tive case. Nominals also appear to obligatorily select case features which render

them active for the purpose of case agreement. Languages are uniform in

selecting these features. Parametric differences between languages arise when

they make different choices of optional syntactic features.

The distinction between obligatory and optional syntactic features is

important for understanding tense and how it is realised morphologically in

languages like English and Chinese. The view we adopt is that there is a syntac-

tic (i.e. semantically uninterpretable) tense feature which, for the sake of

exposition, we call [past], which is available in the universal inventory F, but

which is optional. English has selected it, but Chinese has not. In English, the

presence of [past] in finite T has a consequence for the morphology of the

verb. [past], being a syntactic (formal) feature, is not semantically interpret-

able at LF and so must be eliminated from a syntactic expression before such

interpretation takes place. This elimination is effected through a checking (or

matching) of the features of T with the morphological features of inflected verb

forms like was, had, walked, ran. There are various complications that arise in

this checking/matching operation depending on whether the verb is a light verb

(be, have, do) or a thematic verb (walk, run). We will not expand on these here

(see Lasnik 1999, Embick and Noyer 2001). But the basic claim is that finiteEnglish T has syntactic [past] features which have morphological consequenc-

es for V. By contrast, we claim that Chinese does not have syntactic [past]

features on T, although it does have a syntactic [finite] feature (Li 1990: 18).


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them (2 =4.94, df=2, p


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of -t/-d deletion found in many studies of native speakers (Labov 1989), as

Table 4.Absence of word-final -t/-din monomorphemes and regular simple past tenseforms compared

L1

Chinese Japanese German

Word type -t/-d Score (%) Score (%) Score (%)

Monomorphemes Present

Absent

92 8218 271 964 480 1000Simple past

(Regular)

Present

Absent

25

15

63

37

13712 928 522 964

already observed. Natives are more likely to drop -t/-dwhen a morphological

boundary is not involved than when it is.

Another possibility is that spontaneous oral production introduces perfor-

mance pressures which make it difficult for L2 speakers to access inflected past

tense verb forms in real-time (Prvost and White 2000:129). If this were the

case, performance on the morphology test would be a better reflection of the

informants competence, because it lessens such pressures, while performance

in spontaneous oral use of English underrepresents informants competence.

This also looks implausible in the context of the three-group comparison. If

performance pressures were involved, we would expect them to surface in all

three groups, not just in the Chinese speakers. However, to pursue the possibili-

ty further, we looked at performance of the informants in using regular

inflected participles in cases like were scared of, be sliced, is released, which are

identical to the simple past tense forms. Table 5 brings together the frequencies

of inflected/uninflected regular participles, monomorphemes and regular

simple past tense forms.

Again, although small frequencies are involved, if performance pressures

were responsible for producing optionality in simple past tense marking, we

might expect to see some evidence in the production of participles, where layers

of morphological features also seem to be involved: if a verb form is [finite]

then it is either [+durative] (walking) or [durative]. If it is [durative] it is

either [+past] ((have) walked) or [past] ((to) walk).In summary, the results from spontaneous oral production are the follow-

ing: although the non-native groups were matched for general high proficiency

in L2 English, the Chinese informants were significantly less likely to inflect


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both regular and irregular thematic verbs for past tense than the Japanese or

Table 5.Absence of word-final -t/-d in regular participles, monomorphemes andregular simple past tense forms compared

L1

Chinese Japanese German

Word type -t/-d Score (%) Score (%) Score (%)

Participles Present

Absent

100 1000 230 1000 550 1000Monomorphemes Present

Absent

92 8218 271 964 480 1000Simple past(Regular)

PresentAbsent

2515

6337 13712 928 522 964

German speakers. The Chinese speakers retained word-final -t/-dwith mono-

morphemes more often than with regular past tense verb forms (suggesting the

problem is not caused by word-final consonant clusters). The Chinese speakers

were perfect in inflecting past participles, in contrast to simple past tense verb

forms, suggesting that performance pressures are unlikely as a source ofomission of inflections with past tense verbs.

4. Discussion

We are interested in locating the source of optionality in the marking of

thematic verbs for simple past tense in oral production by certain groups of

high proficiency L2 speakers of English, for example speakers of L1 Chinese. To

address this problem comparative data were collected from L1 speakers of

Chinese, Japanese and German matched for general proficiency as advanced

speakers of English. An important caveat in discussing the results is that the

number of informants was small, therefore the generalisability of any conclu-

sions drawn must be treated with caution. The data were elicited from a test of

knowledge of past tense morphology, and tasks allowing free oral production

(an anecdote and the retelling of a film). Results of the morphology test suggest

that all three groups, including the Chinese speakers, know the morphological

properties of past tense marking in the context of real English verbs, and are

productively aware of the regular versus irregular distinction even with verbs


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they have never encountered before (nonce forms). This is consistent with

earlier findings of Beck (1997), who showed that the reaction times of non-

native speakers on a verb inflection task were parallel to those of native speakers

on the same task. This led her to conclude that the source of optionality of pasttense marking is not located in the operation of the morphological component,

a claim with which we concur.

The comparative results from the free oral production of our three experi-

mental groups show that the Chinese speakers are significantly different from

the other two groups, producing uninflected regular verbs in unambiguously

past tense contexts in over one third of cases. This was prima facie evidence

against the idea that L2 speakers in general have difficulty mapping phonologi-

cal forms (vocabulary items) onto syntactic terminal nodes where thatmapping implicates layers of morphological structure. If this were a general

problem for L2 speakers, and on the assumption that morphological properties

do not transfer from the L1 to the L2, we expected all three groups to show

evidence of it. By looking at the Chinese speakers performance on word-final

consonant clusters in monomorphemic words, and their performance in

inflecting past participles, we also established that optionality in producing final

-t/-dwas lesser in these contexts. This suggested that the source of the problem

with simple past tense was unlikely to be phonological in nature or the result of

performance pressure because similar optionality would be expected across

these contexts too.

Having eliminated the morphological component, and the mapping of

morphophonological forms onto syntactic representations as likely sources of

observed optionality in past tense marking in the informants studied, an

alternative explanation is needed. In this final section we explore the conse-

quences of assuming that optionality results from a failure of L2 learners to

include a syntactic feature for tense, that we are calling [past], among the

features which make up the lexical item T. Where this is the case, T enters

syntactic derivations without the feature which, for native speakers of English,

eventually forces the insertion of vocabulary items inflected for past tense into

terminal nodes. Given such a hypothesis, we need to account for why optiona-

lity is characteristic of the Chinese speakers in our sample, but not the Japanese

or German speakers; why the Chinese speakers nevertheless have greater than

chance success in marking verbs for past tense in past tense contexts; and whythe Chinese speakers might be more successful in marking irregular past forms

and regular participles than in marking regular past forms. Central to this

account is an understanding of the relation between how tense is interpreted by


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the semantic component, and the presence of a syntactic (formal) tense feature

in T. We therefore examine this relationship more closely.

Languages appear to differ in whether they grammaticalise tense through

special morphophonological forms or not. Chinese is standardly assumed tolack such morphophonological forms, although it does have verbal aspect

markers like -le, -guoand -zhe(Li and Thompson 1981, Li 1990, Packard 2000).

For example, as already noted in Section 2, the verb kan see can be freely

interpreted as present or past depending on context:

(3) a. Zhangsan kan dianying.

Zhangsan see movie

Zhangsan is seeing a movie.b. Zhangsan zuotian kan dianying.

Zhangsan yesterday see movie

Zhangsan saw a movie yesterday.

By contrast, Japanese and German do appear to grammaticalise tense, like English.

Japanese has the forms -ta(past) and -ru(non-past) which appear to be tense

auxiliaries (Okuwaki 2000). Thematic verbs in German inflect for past versus

non-past tense like English, with regular and irregular variants (e.g. regular:

kaufenbuy, ich kaufteI bought; irregular: singensing, ich sangI sang).5

Why might some languages have grammatical exponents of a past/non-past

distinction while others, like Chinese, simply lack such exponents? An interest-

ing perspective on this question can be found in the work of Chierchia (1998).

Chierchia suggests that the presence of a syntactic property in a grammar which

is associated with a particular semantic operation has the effect of inhibiting the

free application of that operation. In his own study he suggests that the presence

of articles in a language blocks the free application of the semantic operations

which give nominals generic, definite or indefinite meanings. So in English,

count Ns can only be interpreted as definite when theis present, but in Russian,

which lacks articles, bare Ns can be freely interpreted as generic, definite or

indefinite depending, presumably, on the context (Chierchia 1998:361). This

idea has been extended by Takeda (1999:103) into a Generalised Blocking

Principle (GBP): if a language has a certain functional category in its lexicon,

the free application of the semantic operation that has the same function as that

syntactic category is blocked in that language.

Taking functional category here to mean feature of a functional category,

what the GBP proposes in terms of tense is that the semantic operation which

interprets a T-V configuration as past or non-past can apply freely except where


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a language assigns a syntactic [past] feature to T. This then requires overt

morphological expression and blocks the free operation of tense interpretation.

So while finite bare Vs in Chinese can potentially be interpreted as past, present

or future, depending on the context, finite bare Vs in English can only beinterpreted as non-past, because past tense interpretation is associated with the

specific features which give rise to forms like walked, ran.

Consider now how this idea might be implemented in a grammar which

incorporates some version of distributed morphology (Halle and Marantz 1993,

Embick and Noyer 2001), the kind of model assumed in the work of Lardiere

(2000) and Prvost and White (2000). The syntactic component generates

expressions from bundles of syntactic and semantic features using the opera-

tions merge, move and agree (Chomsky 1998, 1999, 2001). Expressions consistof strings of terminal nodes which are presented to the morphological compo-

nent for the insertion of vocabulary items (phonological forms). Insertion is an

automatic process which takes place where the features of a vocabulary item are

non-distinct from the features of a terminal node. For example, the terminal

string T-V will present the morphological component with features like

[+finite, past] or [+finite, +past]. Vocabulary items with the relevant features

will then compete for insertion into this position. Two important properties of

insertion are firstly that a vocabulary item does not necessarily have to have all

of the features of the terminal node to be inserted; it is sufficient that the

features of the item are non-distinct from those of the terminal node (i.e. they

may be a subset of those features). Secondly, that where vocabulary items are in

competition for insertion into a terminal node, the most highly specified item

compatible with the features of the terminal node is the one which wins the

competition for insertion (Lumsden 1992:480). For example, suppose that

variants ofwalkhave the following feature specifications:

(4) walks [V, +finite, 3p, +sing]

walked [V, +finite, +past]

walk [V ]Given such specifications, onlywalkedcan be inserted into a terminal node with

the features [+finite, +past], even though walkis unspecified for those features

and is in principle available for insertion. The reason is that although both

forms have feature specifications which are non-distinct from the terminal

node, walkedis the more highly specified item.

With such an account of the interaction between syntax and morphology,

it is easy to see how the proposal that adult L2 speakers have difficulty with the


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flavour of the problem, consider the following short extract from the transcript

of one of the Chinese informants in our sample:

When I sawthe film Lonely and Hungry and it remindedme of the old time

when life wasvery hard. Some people theywerevery hungry and theyhaveno

work to do. They reallydontwant to steal. But they hadno other choice and

when theybecomeso hungry and they reallywantto just get the food and just

want to eat the food so they stole or they just do something bad. But its

understandable. It wasnot their mistake And I watchit maybe 20 years ago.

But it I didntremember clearly about what it talkabout. I just laugha lot.

But now when we seethe film, I think. It gaveme much imagination.

What might be prompting this speakers use of the bare verb forms want, watch,

talkand laughin a context where past tense reference is often clearly intended?

We have little idea yet of what the answer might be, but some possibilities

appear unlikely. One explanation for selective verb inflection that has been

advanced in studies of the early stages of L2 acquisition is the Aspect Hypo-

thesis. This maintains that English past markers in early grammars are associat-

ed preferentially with verbs/predicates which have telicity as part of their

meaning (achievements and accomplishments in the terminology of Vendler

(1967)). See Bardovi-Harlig (1999) for a review of work on this topic. Does thesame pattern obtain in the high proficiency Chinese speakers investigated here?

That is, are they treating the regular past tense form as a marker of inherent

verbal/predicate aspect? A breakdown of inflected regular forms by verb type is

given in Table 6.

The results are not conclusive. While statives are not inflected at all, which

Table 6.Inflected past tense regular verbs by aspectual type: Chinese speakersStatives Activities Accomplishments Achievements

Inflected tokens

%

0/4

0%

10/14

71%

1/2

50%

14/20

70%

would be consistent with the Aspect Hypothesis, activities (which are atelic) are

inflected to the same degree as achievements (which are telic). Interestingly,

Lardiere (2002) has also analysed Pattys past tense verb forms in terms of

whether there is a correlation with the telicity of the verb/predicate, and found

that 40% of all telic verbs (112/277, covering both regulars and irregulars) were

marked for past tense, while 35% of all atelic verbs (130/371) were past-marked.


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This is a non-significant difference (using 2). Thus, although the Aspect

Hypothesis might be an explanation for the distribution of English past tense

verbs in low proficiency L2 speakers, it looks unlikely as an explanation for

optionality in the marking of past tense on regular verbs by high proficiency L2speakers.

Another unlikely possibility considered (and rejected) by Lardiere in the

case of Patty is the Discourse Hypothesis (Bardovi-Harlig 1995). This holds

that L2 speakers of English may initially use past forms of verbs to mark

foreground events in narratives, but not mark background events. Foreground

events are defined as clauses that move time forward in a narrative and which,

if interchanged, would change the sequence of events in the narrative; back-

ground events are often out of sequence, provide additional informationabout the foreground events, set the scene, evaluate or explain (Bardovi-Harlig

1995: 265267). Lardiere calculates that 32% of Pattys past-marked verb forms

(13/41) describe foreground events, while 30% (11/38) describe background

events.7 Again, while the Discourse Hypothesis might explain the distribution

of forms in low proficiency L2 speakers, it looks unlikely to be the source of

optionality in high proficiency L2 speakers.

The only hypothesis we are able to advance at present (but for which there is

scant evidence in our current sample) is the following: linguistic theory appears to

need to allow operations which apply to strings post-syntactically, that is in the

morphological component or following vocabulary insertion. For example,

Chomsky (1999) proposes that English has an output condition which bars surface

adjacency between V and direct objects where the V is an unaccusative or a passive.

For example, although (6a) is the expected output expression generated by the

syntax, it is less natural than (6b) or (6c). Chomsky claims that a post-syntactic

output constraint forces the object to move either leftwards or rightwards:

(6) a. There was placed a large bowl on the table.

b. There was a large bowl placed ___ on the table.

c. There was placed ___ on the table a large bowl.

The surface ordering of clitic clusters in French also appears to be the effect of a

post-syntactic output condition (Perlmutter 1971). If two third person clitics co-

occur, an accusative form precedes a dative, but if a first or second person and

a third person clitic co-occur, a dative form precedes an accusative (as in (7)):

(7) a. Elle le lui donne.

she it-acc him-dat gives

She is giving it to him.


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b. Elle me le donne.

she me-dat it-acc gives

She is giving it to me.

This suggests that the language faculty allows some monitoring of surface

strings. Perhaps in the normal case for Chinese speakers the morphology inserts

bare verb vocabulary items into T-V strings. But because output checking is a

possibility available in the grammar, Chinese speakers monitor the ambient

discourse for pastness and insert V-ed forms when they are able to detect it.

So, as in French where ordering of object clitics is determined by the person of

the forms in question (first and second person must precede third person), for

the Chinese speakers selection of a V-ed form is determined by pastness. Thedifference between the two cases is that whereas [person] is a feature present in

the specification of the French pronoun vocabulary items, pastness has to be

determined on the basis of context.

Because context is involved, the monitoring process is unstable and gives

rise to the kind of apparently random use of bare and inflected verb forms

illustrated in the sample of informant speech given above. This is consistent

with two observations about the marking of regular verbs for past tense by

Chinese speakers. First, individual speakers of high proficiency can differmarkedly in the extent to which they are successful in inflecting verbs. Our

informants are apparently more successful in spontaneous oral production than

Patty, for example. Secondly, different modalities allow a greater degree of

success in past tense marking by the same individual. So our informants were

more successful on the morphology test than in oral production, and Lardiere

(2002) reports that Pattys written output (in the form of e-mail messages)

shows higher proportions of past tense marking than her spoken output.

5. Conclusion: The interface between syntax and the lexicon in adult SLA

In a comparison of the performance of three groups of highly proficient L2

speakers of English (with Chinese, Japanese and German as L1s), it was found

that the marking of past tense was optional in the spoken English of the Chinese

speakers, but not in the case of the Japanese and German speakers. With the

caveat that caution is required in generalising from small numbers of informants,we argued that the Chinese speakers knowledge of English morphological

processes is intact (as Beck (1997) had already argued), and that phonological


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properties (i.e. -t/-ddeletion) did not appear to be a factor for our speakers.

Furthermore, we found that past participle and irregular past tense forms were

inflected more consistently than regulars.

Although previous studies have argued that L2 speakers can fully acquirethe syntactic features of lexical items like T (Lardiere 1998a, 1998b, 2000,

Prvost and White 2000), we explored the alternative possibility that Chinese

speakers cannot establish [past] on T in English precisely because this feature

is absent in their L1. By contrast [past] is present on T both in Japanese and

German. If Chinese speakers do not have access to such a feature in the con-

struction of L2 knowledge, but Japanese and German speakers do, this would

explain the observed difference between them in inflecting thematic verbs for

past tense in spontaneous production.We linked this deficit in the Chinese speakers grammars to the idea that

optional syntactic features, when selected, block the free application of

semantic operations (Chierchia 1998, Takeda 1999). Our account assumes that

these optional properties are subject to a critical period (an idea which origi-

nates in the work of Tsimpli and Roussou (1991) and Smith and Tsimpli

(1995)). We then explored, in highly speculative mode, reasons why Chinese

speakers might be successful at all in marking thematic verbs for past tense.

This line of enquiry raises an interesting possibility for the interface

between the syntactic component and the lexicon in adult SLA. Within the

spirit of minimalist enquiry, it might be proposed that all of the resources and

computational procedures of the language faculty LF, syntax, morphology

are intact and operative in adult SLA. However, optional (parametrised)

syntactic features which play a major role in tying morphosyntactic structure to

semantic operations in the L1 acquisition of specific languages are unavailable

if not activated in early life. In parsing L2 data, older L2 speakers can use all of

the resources except for these features. Phonological forms (vocabulary items)

which are selected by such features in native grammars are not selected by those

features in the grammars of L2 learners beyond the critical period. Highly

proficient speakers must nevertheless find some motivation for them. We

rejected some of the conceivable ways in which Chinese speakers might

motivate past tense verb forms in English (the Aspect Hypothesis and the

Discourse Hypothesis), and we suggested that they might

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