Greg Thomson, Kazakstan Academy of Sciences & Bayan Uataeva, Al-Farabi Kazakstan State National University

Morphological Typology and SLA: Inflectional processes in L2 Russian vs. L2 Kazak

In recent research (Thomson, 2000), L2 listeners demonstrated low sensitivity to inflectional form in Russian. The level of sensitivity appeared to increase only gradually over several years of experience with the language, and showed little promise that it would ever approach native-likeness. This finding may reflect the difficulty that the language acquisition mechanisms have in establishing and maintaining form-function associations when the relationships of form to function are many-to-many in nature, as they are in Russian. Differences between languages of the inflectional morphological type, such as Russian, and languages of the agglutinative type, such as Turkish, have been observed in L1 acquisition and aphasia (Slobin, 1985, 1989). These findings provide evidence that, even in the presence of relatively complex allomorphy, agglutinative grammatical morphology (where form-function relationships are more nearly one-to-one) has an advantage in acquisition and processing over inflectional-type grammatical morphology. This leads us to anticipate greater success in the L2 acquisition of complex grammatical morphology in agglutinative languages than in inflectional languages. Confirmation of this expecation would deepen our understanding of the impact of form-function relationships on second language acquisition. In the current study, this expectation is tested through the adaptation for learners of L2 Kazak (Turkic) of one of the experiments conducted with L2 Russian learners as reported in Thomson (2000).