The role of cross-linguistic lexical similarity in the use of motion verbs in English by Chinese and Japanese learners

The central purpose of this dissertation is to examine whether foreign language learners can benefit from cross-linguistic lexical similarities between the native language (NL) and the target language (TL), where the two languages involved are typologically unrelated. For this purpose, a group of adult Chinese-speaking learners (whose mother tongue shares a similarity in motion verbs with English) and a group of adult Japanese-speaking learners (whose mother tongue does not share such a similarity) were selected and three motion verb tasks in English were designed for the two groups of learners to perform. A vocabulary test in English was used to ensure that the participants in this study had the vocabulary to cope with the motion verb tasks and that the two groups would have similar vocabulary sizes. In addition, questionnaires were designed to elicit background information about the learners to make sure that the two groups of participants were compatible in terms of age, gender composition, education, and experience in learning English, and to solicit their perceptions of NL-TL distance. By means of a brief mini-lesson, half of the Chinese participants were alerted to such a cross-linguistic similarity in motion verbs and half of the Japanese participants were alerted to the NL-TL dissimilarity. A comparison between cued and non-cued learners was designed to assess the effect of metalinguistic information on their performance on the motion verb tasks and its effects on their perceptions of NL-TL distance.;The study produced clear evidence that the Chinese learners performed better than the Japanese learners on all the three motion verb tasks, demonstrating the facilitative role of cross-linguistic similarity in target lexical acquisition. The study also produced some preliminary and inclusive evidence about the positiveness of learners' metalinguistic awareness as a general tendency for the cued learners (Chinese and Japanese combined) to score better than the combined non-cued learners on these tasks was noted. This study also suggests some effect of learners' metacognition as manifested on their perceptions of language distance as the Chinese learners viewed English as significantly more similar after the experiment than before it.