A Selected Paper on Native Language Effect

I selected Interpretation of English multiple wh-questions by japanese speakers: A missing uninterpretable feature account by Roger Hawkins and Hajime Hattori.

As we learned in class, Native Language Effect is two-folded: that is, it can be EITHER facilitation OR interference. This selected paper is mostly about the interference. Initial research question of the paper starts from Tsimpli (2003) suggesting that uninterpretable syntactic features that have not been selected during first language(L1) acquisition will not be available for L2 grammar construction. However, interpretable syntactic features remain available even those not selected by the L1.

Conclusively, the authors argue that there is a critical period for the selection of uninterpretable syntactic features for the construction of mental grammars. Moreover, caution should be required in interpreting target-like performance as evidence that L2 speakers have the same underlying grammatical representations as native speakers.

Personally, this paper is very interesting in that Japanese shares a lot of properties with Korean. The Wh-in-situ language such as Japanese lacks the movement-forcing feature. As far as I know from my native intuition, Korean can be regarded as a Wh-in-situ langauge. However, someone can argue that Korean is not in that Korean acually allows Wh-movement because Korean is very famous for its word order flexibility. I'm also curious about the movement-forcing features.

In a nutshell, it is useful for linguists or TESOL researchers who are interested in native language effect. In particular, if your target language is a Wh-in-situ language, this paper will give you some comparative and contrastive points of view.