TYPOLOGICAL APPROACH TO LANGUAGE UNIVERSALS AND LANGUAGE TRANSFER IN SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: LANGUAGE TYPOLOGY OF WORD ORDER

This study explored (1) the psychological reality of word order typology for L2 learners, (2) the influence of mother-tongue on L2 learners' competence.;Experimentation was designed on the basis of language typology (i.e., studies of word order related typological universals) in which an independent variable was learners' native language type categorized as two levels (VO and OV).;Data were elicited through questionnaires of grammaticality judgment, confidence, paired comparison, and sentence combining tasks which were given to various native language groups of two hundred and seventy-nine college-age EFL students and also to a control group of seventy-one native speakers of English.;Under the assumption that word order, one aspect of syntax, has a psychological reality in language learners, the two major hypotheses were (1) to test the influence of learners' L1 typological characteristics on L2 learners' competence as measured by grammaticality judgment and confidence and (2) to test L2 learners' sensitivity depending on their L1 canonical word order to the proposed universal tendency in the coordinate deletion (the tendency to delete redundant elements in the forward direction in coordination reduction).;Of the two major lines of research on language universals, Chomskyan and Greenbergian, the Greenbergian approach (cross-linguistic generalization in terms of word order parameters) was adopted and argued as a fruitful framework for L2 acquisition research. This framework can address a particular principle that governs L2 acquisition, i.e., the interaction of language universals and language transfer.;Results of ANOVA on the scores of grammaticality judgment and confidence supported both hypotheses by showing systematic differences among the language groups and were confirmed by the analysis of complementary data from paired comparison and sentence combining tasks.;The evidence of this research strongly suggests that language transfer need not solely be restricted to production strategies--it effects one's competence as well.;The results also suggest that typological universals (cross-linguistic generalization) based on word order parameters have a psychological reality for L2 learners and hence could provide a valuable testing ground for proposals regarding the nature of L2 acquisition and the problems of L2 learners.