The L2 Acquisition of Information Sequencing in Chinese: The Case of English CSL learners in Taiwan.

Abstract

Research has indicated that L1 transfer appears at early stages of L2 acquisition and decreases as L2 proficiency increases. Additionally, it has been shown that learners exhibit different linguistic behavior according to distinct task types. This study employs a cross-linguistic learner performance comparison, encompassing 30 English CSL learners as the experimental group, 30 Korean CSL learners as the control group, and 35 Chinese native speakers as the baseline group. The English and Korean CSL learners are further divided into three L2 proficiency levels. All participants completed sentence and discourse tasks. There are three major findings. First, L1 transfer is found to occur in the English learners’ Chinese interlanguage. Second, L1 transfer is mitigated by the English learners’ Chinese L2 proficiency. Third, the discourse function of correlative markers yinwei/suoyi (“because/so”) employed by Chinese native speakers to signal guidepost-echo relationship has not been acquired by the two CSL groups, irrespective of their Chinese L2 proficiency.