The current study explores first language (L1) transfer in child second language (L2) acquisition, testing whether L1-Chinese children learning L2 Korean show an advantage over L1-Russian children in the acquisition of Korean reflexives.
Methodology:
L1-Chinese and L1-Russian children with L2 Korean completed truth-value judgment tasks designed to explore their interpretation of the Korean reflexives caki and caki-casin in bi-clausal sentences. Chinese, like Korean, has a monomorphemic reflexive that takes a long-distance (LD) antecedent, and a polymorphemic reflexive that prefers a local antecedent; Russian, in contrast, has only a monomorphemic reflexive, which requires a local interpretation in finite clauses.
Data and analysis:
The proportion of preferences for each condition in the tasks was statistically compared using a logistic mixed-effects regression.
Findings:
The study resulted in two main findings. First, L1-Chinese children, regardless of L2 proficiency, preferred the LD antecedent (i.e., the matrix clause subject) for caki and the local antecedent (i.e., the embedded clause subject) for caki-casin, which is target-like for Korean and consistent with the interpretation of the Chinese reflexives ziji and taziji. Second, high-proficiency (but not low-proficiency) L1-Russian children showed target-like behavior in rejecting an LD interpretation for caki-casin, but a non-target-like acceptance of the local interpretation for caki, which may be due to L1 transfer based on Russian’s locally bound reflexive.
Originality:
L1 transfer in the interpretation of L2 reflexive pronouns has been reported with adults, but not with children. The current study fills this research gap.
Implications:
This study provides evidence that supports L1 transfer in the context of child L2 reflexive interpretation, countering arguments claiming for a limited role of L1 transfer in child L2 acquisition.
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