Morphological Transfer in the Development of L2 English Dative Constructions

Within a processing-based framework of L2 acquisition, we revise the morphological transfer hypothesis to explain how Korean learners of English process English dative constructions. Our revised morphological transfer hypothesis holds that a combination of L1 Korean morphemes that are not required for the well-formedness of L2 English sentences will be negatively transferred and cause processing difficulty in the grammatical judgment of L2 sentences. The accusative marker, the dative marker, and the additional verbal morpheme cwu-(only in benefactive double object constructions) are required to build well-formed dative constructions in Korean. However, such morphological cues are absent in English dative counterparts, which potentially impedes the processing of English dative sentences by Korean learners of English. We predicted that Korean L2 English learners' difficulty would depend on the number of such impeding factors and the learners' English proficiency level -lower-proficiency learners would have more difficulties than higher-proficiency learners with English datives containing multiple impeding factors, while learners would be better at processing datives with one impeding factor than the ones with multiple impeding factors. Results from a grammatical judgment task (GJT) supported the revised hypothesis, suggesting that the presence of overt morphological cues in L1 dative sentences disturbs the grammatical acceptability of L2 counterparts without such cues.