CROSS-LINGUISTIC DIFFERENCES IN THE LEARNING OF INFLECTIONAL MORPHOLOGY: EFFECTS OF TARGET LANGUAGE PARADIGM COMPLEXITY

Abstract

Inflectional morphology poses significant difficulty to learners of foreign languages. Multiple approaches have attempted to explain it through one of two lenses. First, inflection has been viewed as one manifestation of syntactic knowledge; its learning has been related to the learning of syntactic structures. Second, the perceptual and semantic properties of the morphemes themselves have been invoked as a cause of difficulty. These groups of accounts presuppose different amounts of abstract knowledge and quite different learning mechanisms. On syntactic accounts, learners possess elaborate architectures of syntactic projections that they use to analyze linguistic input. They do not simply learn morphemes as discrete units in a list—instead, they learn the configurations of feature settings that these morphemes express. On general-cognitive accounts, learners do learn morphemes as units—each with non-zero difficulty and more or less independent of the others. The “more” there is to learn, the worse off the learner. This dissertation paves the way towards integrating the two types of accounts by testing them on cross-linguistic data. This study compares learning rates for languages whose inflectional systems vary in complexity (as reflected in the number of distinct inflectional endings)—German (lowest), Italian (high), and Czech (high, coupled with morpholexical variation). Written learner productions were examined for the accuracy of verbal inflection on dimensions ranging from morphosyntactic (uninflected forms, non-finite forms, use of finite instead of non-finite forms) to morpholexical (errors in root processes, application of wrong verb class templates, or wrong phonemic composition of the root or ending). Error frequencies were modeled using Poisson regression. Complexity affected accuracy differently in different domains of inflection production. Inflectional paradigm complexity was facilitative for learning to supply inflection, and learners of Italian and Czech were not disadvantaged compared to learners of German, despite their paradigms having more distinct elements. However, the complexity of verb class systems and the opacity of morphophonological alternations did result in disadvantages. Learners of Czech misapplied inflectional patterns associated with verb classes more than learners of German; they also failed to recall the correct segments associated with inflections, which resulted in more frequent use of inexistent forms.