Plenary Speaker
Neal Snape
Gunma Prefectural Women's University
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The Acquisition of Determiners in L3 German: Teasing apart L1 / L2 Transfer Effects
Our study examines the L3 acquisition of various nominal conditions with the aim to find out whether there is L1 and/or L2 transfer to L3 German and acquisition of L3 German. 21 L1 Japanese > L2 English > L3 German speakers, living in a German-speaking environment, plus 14 monolingual L1 German controls and 14 monolingual L1 English controls participated. All participants had to complete C-tests in German and English along with a grammaticality judgement task where participants were instructed to rate a target sentence within a short context on a Likert scale of 1-7 (1 = unacceptable, 7 = acceptable). There are four conditions that tease apart where the possible transfer effects come from: 1. Count / mass, 2. Specific, 3. Proper Names and Generics, 4. Professions. The L3 learners were divided into low (below 50) and high groups (above 50), based on their C-test scores for German and English. The preliminary results suggest that for condition 1. there is potential transfer from L3 German to L2 English as there is a high rating for the use of articles, which is ungrammatical in English. There is also evidence of acquisition as the high group makes a distinction between the use of articles in German. For condition 2, there is L1 transfer into the L2 and L3 as the acceptance rating for Specific is 4 for the low and high groups (no article is ungrammatical in English and German), though the high group perform better in their L3. Condition 3 shows transfer from L3 German to L2 English as Proper Names and Generics in English do not appear with an article. Condition 4 suggests transfer from L3 German to L2 English as the rating of ungrammatical sentences in German, e.g., dass er Arzt ist (he is doctor) is high.
Neal Snape obtained his MA and PhD in Language and Linguistics from the University of Essex, UK. He completed a post-doc at the University of Calgary and taught ESL classes, and then went on to teach EFL and Linguistics at Hokkaido University. His research interests include adult second language acquisition, heritage language acquisition, returnees and third language acquisition. He is currently a full-time Professor in the Department of English at Gunma Prefectural Women’s University, Japan and a part-time Professor at Chuo University where he teaches second language acquisition, bilingualism, psycholinguistics and phonetics and phonology courses.
He currently serves as a committee member for Japan Society of Language Sciences and Japan Second Language Association. He is also Associate Editor of Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, sits on the advisory board for the Journal of the European Second Language Association and is a member of the Second Language Research editorial board and Pedagogical Linguistics editorial board.
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