Resumen de A Feature-based Contrastive Approach to the L2 Acquisition of Specificity

Jacee Cho, Roumyana Slabakova

• This study examined the acquisition of the Russian indefinite determiners (kakoj-to ‘which-to’ and kakoj-nibud’ ‘which-nibud’’) encoding scopal specificity by English and Korean native speakers within the feature-based contrastive framework (Lardiere 2008, 2009). The specificity markers kakoj-to and kakoj-nibud’ are reflections of different values of three major nominal features: definiteness, scopal specificity, and referentiality. The learning task for each functional item differs with respect to mapping and reconfiguration of the feature combinations. Our experimental data suggest that the morpheme kakoj-to was acquired early since English (some) and Korean (eotteon ‘some’) have the corresponding morphemes with the same featural representation as the Russian kakoj-to. The morpheme kakoj-nibud’ presented a greater difficulty since its featural make-up is not overtly realized in English or Korean, that is, learners had to reassemble the target feature set. Such developmental patterns provide evidence that feature reassembly poses a challenge in second language acquisition. On the basis of the findings, pedagogical implications are discussed.