Describe this child’s use of wh-words. What does it tell us about her interlanguage in terms of L1 transfer?

The following utterances were produced by a second language learner at the early stages of learning English. All of the sentences were gathered from spontaneous utterances.

The most likely intention (given the context) of these utterances is provided in parentheses, when the intention of her utterance is not obvious from the forms produced. As you see, the learner has two forms to express progressive meaning: the Verb + -ing form (e.g., eating and the simple form of the verb (e.g., watch)

Question 1:What hypotheses does the leaner have regarding progressive sentences?When does she use the Verb + -ing form? When does she use the simple verb form of the verb? State the hypotheses(or hypothesis) that can explain all or most of the utterances below.

Question 2:Can the hypotheses/hypothesisin (i) explain all of the utterances below? If not, how do you account for the utterance(s)that the hypotheses/hypothesis cannot explain?

(1)He’s sleeping.

(2)She’s sleeping.

(3) It’s raining.

(4) He’s eating.

(5) Hani’s sleeping.

(6) The dog eating. (The dog is eating.)

(7) Haniwatch TV. (Hani is watching TV.)

(8) Watch TV. (He is watching TV.)(9) Read the paper. (He is reading the paper.)

(10) Drink the coffee. (He is drinking coffee.)

2[B] Part 1The following utterances were produced by a 6-year old L1 Japanese childat the early stages of learning English.

*************Linguistic Background

Japanese word order is SOV (subject-object-verb).

To form questions, an interrogative particle kais placed at the end of the sentence. There is no inversion of subject and verb,and wh-words do not necessarily appear in the sentence initial position, as can be seen below:Are-wa nan desu-ka?that what is Q“What is that?”

*************Question 1: Consider the way this child forms questions at Month 1. What kind of generalization has she made about English questions?

Question 2: Now consider the child’s questions at Month 2. Is the child using the same generalization as she was at Month 1? What additional information do the data at Month 2 provide about the interpretation of the data at Month 1?

Question 3: Describe this child’s use of wh-words. What does it tell us about her interlanguage in terms of L1 transfer?

Last Completed Projects