ASKING QUESTIONS IN LEARNER ENGLISH: FIRST AND …

ASKING QUESTIONS IN LEARNER ENGLISH: FIRST AND SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION OF MAIN AND EMBEDDED

INTERROGATIVE STRUCTURES by

LUCIA POZZAN

A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2011

? 2011 LUCIA POZZAN All Rights Reserved

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This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Linguistics in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

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VIRGINIA VALIAN

__________________________________________ Chair of Examining Committee

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GITA MARTOHARDJONO

_____________________________________ Executive Officer

MARTIN CHODOROW EVA FERN?NDEZ JANET DEAN FODOR Supervisory Committee

THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

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Abstract ASKING QUESTIONS IN LEARNER ENGLISH: FIRST AND SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION OF MAIN AND EMBEDDED

INTERROGATIVE STRUCTURES

by Lucia Pozzan Adviser: Professor Virginia Valian This dissertation examines how adults and children learning English produce and judge English interrogative structures. The ultimate goal of this study is to contribute to an understanding of the extent, nature and sources of learners' persistent difficulties with some syntactic properties of the language they are acquiring. To examine whether word order errors in the production of English interrogatives by L2 learners stem from lack of knowledge or from difficulties with automatic implementation of L2 procedures under real-time constraints, L2 learners' performance across a range of tasks (oral and written production, timed and untimed grammaticality judgments) is compared. To examine whether errors in the production of English interrogatives by L2 learners can be imputed to transfer of L1 properties, L1 Chinese and L1 Spanish learners' production patterns are compared. Finally, to examine whether errors in the production of L1 learners can be attributed to properties of the adult input, the results from an elicited production study with 3-5 year olds are examined in light of the frequency of different word combinations in the adult input. Taken together, the results of the present studies indicate that difficulties with English interrogative structures (a) are a consistent phenomenon both in L1 and L2 acquisition, (b) might

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be better accounted for in terms of non-target-like representations rather than difficulties with implementation of L2 procedures, and (c) do not follow in a direct way from the properties of learners' L1s or the properties of the input. Furthermore, the results of the present studies show that learners' errors are associated with specific syntactic configurations (wh- vs. yes/no structures) and wh-words (why and when vs. who, what, and where), suggesting that child and adult learners entertain similar grammatical hypotheses and make use of similar mechanisms for language acquisition.

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