Noun, verb, or adjective? L2 learners' sensitivity to cues to word class

Abstract

This study investigates learners' knowledge of word classes (i.e. noun, verb, adjective) in their second language (L2). Although some L2 studies have examined the problem of word class indirectly through a focus on vocabulary and the teaching of derivational morphology (Morin, 2003, 2006; Schmitt & Zimmerman, 2002), little is known about learners' sensitivity to word class contrasts (e.g. fuerte ‘strong’ versus fuerza ‘strength’). The present study utilised concurrent and retrospective think-aloud protocols to examine learners' attention to different sorts of cues to word class in Spanish. The participants, beginning-level learners of Spanish (n = 35), completed a forced-choice task that targeted word class contrasts in various syntactic contexts. The results indicate that learners attended to grammatical cues frequently, with these accounting for 45% of the total cue usage. Among the various grammatical cues, learners showed a marked preference for inflections (i.e. gender and number). The use of semantic cues was also common (32%), but led to word class confusions when learners knew only the general meaning of a target word but not the exact L1 equivalent. Finally, an error analysis indicates that the main problem for these learners may not be misclassification of lexical items but rather incomplete syntactic knowledge.

Keywords:

• categorisation
• noticing
• SLA
• Spanish
• verbal protocols

Notes

1. All of the subsequent examples are taken from the current study and Zyzik and Azevedo (2009).

2. For reasons of space, many details are necessarily omitted in this section. I refer the interested reader to comprehensive reviews in LaBelle (2005) and Gerken (2001).

3. Indeed, fuerza is the third-person subjunctive form of forzar (‘to force’). It could be argued, then, that the learner has not misclassified the target word. Nevertheless, the learner fails to recognise fuerza as a noun (problem 2) and fails to identify the slot as requiring a noun (problem 1).

4. Harris (1991) pointed out that –o and –a are word markers rather than gender markers because they are not limited to lexical items that have gender.

5. For a detailed discussion of how new words become established in the L2 lexicon, I refer the reader to theoretical models of lexical development, such as that of Jiang (2000), which I do not elaborate on for reasons of space.