"What does this project find why ESL learners make strange errors?" Although complex questions of this type (called wh-scope marking questions) are clearly ungrammatical in English, they can readily be observed in the language of learners of English as a Second Language (ESL). This research project compares two groups of ESL populations, German and Japanese learners, with the goal of investigating the extent to which this syntactic error reflects actual linguistic competence (i.e., a difference in the learner's grammar from the grammar of the target language, English) or whether this error is a temporary performance phenomenon resulting from processing difficulties. Wh-scope marking questions are completely acceptable in German, whereas they are not in Japanese. Given that second language (L2) learners are known to transfer knowledge from their native language (L1) into their L2 grammar, we expect that such transfer will occur for the German L2 learners; in their case, this type of error would be a competence-induced error. For the Japanese L2 learners, however, transfer cannot be the reason for the occurrence of the wh-scope marking question, since wh-scope marking forms neither part of the English input that they encounter nor part of their native language knowledge; in this L1-L2 constellation, the error might be a performance phenomenon. In order to investigate whether transfer and/or processing is at the root of wh-scope marking for the two groups of ESL learners, three kinds of measurement will be used: (a) an off-line (paper and pencil) acceptability judgment task, frequently used in L2 research to assess a learner's grammatical competence; (b) an on-line, self-paced reading task, which is one of the standard measurements used in psycholinguistic research to detect processing patterns; and (c) an elicited production task, intended to test whether wh-scope marking is restricted to language comprehension or if it also occurs in language production.
The results of this research project will shed light on two basic factors involved in the acquisition of a second language: transfer and processing. By gathering data on wh-scope marking from native and non-native speakers, the research project will increase our understanding about similarities and differences in processing patterns between these two groups. Findings about how the wh-scope marking construction is processed have the potential to distinguish between two theoretical approaches to its syntactic analysis. The results of this study may inform L2 pedagogy and may improve L2 instruction as well as research on L2 teaching methods by determining which linguistic constructions are not processable by a particular learner at a given stage of his/her interlanguage development. An electronic corpus of interlanguage data elicited through quite diverse techniques will be produced. Finally, the project will bring together researchers from three universities in the US, Germany and Japan, thus strengthening the international network of linguistic researchers and promoting a partnership across the involved university programs.
