Volume 12, Number 4

Language Distance and L3 Japanese Acquisition in Morphosyntactic Module

  Authors

Wenchao Li, Zhejiang University, China

  Abstract

This study applies mathematical linguistics to explore how language distance plays an essential role in third language acquisition in terms of a morphosyntactic module. Data were drawn from 3410 essays written in Japanese by low, middle and high levels of learners from 12 first-language (L1) backgrounds who acquire English as a second language (L2)-interlanguage and Japanese as a third language (L3). The findings indicate that (a) mean dependency distance is an efficient indicator for syntactic complexity of writing proficiency. In both elementary and intermediate groups, learners of highly agglutinative languages are likely to show higher dependency distance than learners from isolated-language and fusion-language backgrounds. (b) The frequency and dependency distance are distributed in Power Law Function. Fitting Right truncated Good to the dependency distances indicates that the values of the parameter p ascend as the degree of agglutination of learners’ mother tongue increases. (c) The syntactic complexity in multi-background Japanese learners’ essays highlights that no matter how diverse the learners’ native and target languages are, the syntax is always constrained by universal law, namely, minimising dependency distance. This is in accordance with existing findings in second language acquisition of inflectional languages.

  Keywords

language distance, writing proficiency, mathematical linguistics, L3 acquisition, mean dependency distance.