Issues in East Asian Language Acquisition (review)

This volume is a collection of papers on the first- and second-language acquisition of East Asian languages (Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, and Taiwanese). All but two of the papers were presented at a workshop on the psycholinguistics of East Asian languages held at The Ohio State University in 1999. The volume appears in the context of heightened interest in these languages from the standpoint of language acquisition theory, reflected in such publications as Whitman & Shirai 2000 (which includes papers from the workshop held at the 1997 LSA Summer Institute, the predecessor to the 1999 OSU gathering) and Li et al. 2006.

Two of the most interesting papers in the volume from a general theoretical standpoint focus on second-language acquisition. Koichi Sawasaki and Mineharu Nakayama (‘Null pronouns in English-speaking JFL learners’ Japanese’) investigate the acquisition of subject and object null pronouns by adult English-speaking learners of Japanese. They find that the JFL learners’ performance on a truth-value judgment task is quite close to that of the native control group, except with sentences of the pattern ‘[e_i] is looking at the father_i’, where the stimulus picture shows the father looking at himself in the mirror. Control-group native speakers successfully judge such sentences deviant, but JFL learners vary, with advanced speakers closest to the native control group but beginning learners performing better than intermediate. Since any interpretation of [e_i] licensed by UG (pro, trace, and null anaphor) in this context should be deviant, it appears that the best explanation for imperfect acquisition is the pedagogical one suggested by Sawasaki and Nakayama: classroom pressure to use null pronouns wherever possible may lead to confusion.

Youngon Choi, Reiko Mazuka, and Reiko Akahane Yamada (‘The influence of first language phonology on young children’s production of foreign sounds: Korean and Japanese children’s production of English /r/ and /l/’) investigate the effect of first-language phonology on second-language acquisition. As noted by previous researchers, Japanese and Korean provide an interesting contrast because neither has a phonemic contrast between laterals and rhotics, but Korean has two liquid allophones, flap [ɾ] and lateral [l], the latter restricted to coda position, while Japanese has only /R/. The Korean-Japanese contrast thus poses the question of whether the inventory of phones (as opposed to phonemes) in a language provides a comparative advantage in acquisition. Previous researchers have examined this question with perception studies of adult speakers of Japanese and Korean; Choi and colleagues examine children between 4 and 8 using an elicited imitation experiment.

Choi and colleagues’ results are consistent with previous perception studies: they find that in almost all environments, Korean children produce /r/ and /l/ exemplars judged by English native speakers as better approximations of the English models than those produced by Japanese children. The young age of their subjects shows that this difference cannot be a product of English teaching in the schools. At the most basic level, the result is predicted by a feature-based L2 acquisition model such as Brown 2000, which holds that learners more readily acquire a contrast in the L2 if the feature associated with the contrast is present in the L1 grammar. Thus Korean, but not Japanese, requires a feature [lateral]. Not all of the details of the Korean-Japanese contrast are predicted, however, either by a featural model or by the perceptual assimilation model (Best 1995) tentatively espoused by Choi and colleagues. For example, the ‘best’ exemplar produced by either group of children is the imitation of word-final /r/ produced by Korean children; but the perceptual assimilation model seems to predict that the r ∼ l contrast should be most difficult for Korean L1 speakers in exactly this position (19).

A second study on phonological acquisition, Jane Tsay’s ‘Phonetic parameters of tone acquisition in Taiwanese’, investigates first-language acquisition on the tonal system in Taiwanese (Minnan). Tsay...