The Role Of Markedness And Psychotypology In Language Transfer

Although language transfer has long been a controversial topic in applied linguistics,second language acquisition, and language teaching, native language transfer is generallyregarded as an important characteristic of L2 acquisition despite all the conflicting arguments(Odlin, 1989). Since 1980s, with the development of cognitive theories, linguists andpsycholinguists have been more concerned with the constraints on language transfer and howL1 influences L2, i.e., the problems of prediction, which have an especially important bearingon the study of transfer. In the studies on constraints on language transfer, markedness andpsychotypology appear as important factors in the explanation of cross-linguistic influence.The influence of markedness in the process of SLA has been extensively discussed andexamined by Chinese researchers, whereas little attention was paid on psychotypology. Inorder to investigate the predictive power of the two constraints on language transfer,markedness and psychotypology, and examine the relationship between the two, the followingthree questions were addressed:Research Question 1: Can psychotypology predict language transfer effectively?Research Question 2: Can markedness predict language transfer effectively?Research Question 3: If they can, how markedness and psychotypology interact inlanguage transfer?Based on data obtained from 45 adult Chinese ESL learners, this study presents empiricalevidence in support of the existence of negative transfer from Chinese to English andaccounts for the predictive power of markedness and psychotypology and the interactionbetween the two. Four methodologies were used: individual interview questions, sentencecreation, translation and grammaticality judgment. This study explored lexical and syntacticerrors in the use of 5 selected linguistic items (under, marry, be, there be, relative clause) as aresult of likely influences of Chinese. Accordingly, 5 error (negative transfer) types werefocused on, namely (a) confusion in meaning, (b) confusion in verb transitivity, (c) lack ofcontrol of the copula, (d) inability to use the there be structure, and (e) failure to use therelative clause. The results showed that most of them had positive attitudes to native languageinfluence and tended to their L1 knowledge strategically and that in all of the five linguisticitems under investigation, the typical interlanguage output of the Chinese ESL learners isidentical or very similar to the usual sentence structure in their L1, Chinese.