Second Language Users’ Restriction of Linguistic Generalization Errors: The Case of English Un– Prefixation Development
I am deeply grateful to Pavel Trofimovich and the Language Learning editorial team as well as to four anonymous reviewers for their excellent suggestions in revising this manuscript. I also thank all the students and teachers who participated in this study, Ben Ambridge for sharing his data and R scripts with me, and Wulin Ma (Sichuan International Studies University) and Yan Jiang (Chongqing RTV University) for their help in data collection. This research was supported by a grant from the National Social Science Foundation of China awarded to Xiaopeng Zhang (Award Reference: 15CYY018).
Abstract
This study adopted Ambridge's research paradigm to examine the effects of entrenchment, preemption, and verb semantics in second language (L2) acquisition of English un– prefixation. Three groups of Chinese learners of English (second‐ and fourth‐year English majors and teachers of English) rated the acceptability of 48 un– prefixed verbs and their bare forms. Frequency of bare forms (e.g., close) was a factor associated with the preference of the fourth‐year learners and the teachers to reject ungrammatical un– verbs (e.g., unclose). However, competing forms (e.g., open) did not appear to be linked to participants’ judgments of the acceptability of ungrammatical un– verbs, lending support to the entrenchment rather than the preemption hypothesis. Ratings of the extent to which verbs incorporate the semantics of un– verbs emerged as significant predictors for the fourth‐year learners’ and the teachers’ judgements of the acceptability of grammatical un– verbs, supporting the semantic verb class hypothesis.
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Number of times cited: 1
- XIAOPENG ZHANG and CHUNPING MAI, Effects of entrenchment and preemption in second language learners’ acceptance of English denominal verbs, Applied Psycholinguistics, 10.1017/S0142716417000406, 39, 02, (413-436), (2017).
