The Effects Of Markedness Theory And Psychotypology On Language Transfer

Language transfer has been a controversial issue for at least a century. With the development of cognitive theory, language transfer as a complicate mental process has been accepted by the researchers. Constrains of language transfer has long been a core issue in this field, in the study of all the constraints of language transfer, markedness theory and pshchotypology seem to be the most important factors to explain the cross-linguistic influence in language transfer.In order to explore the effects of markedness theory and pschotypology on language transfer, the paper focuses on the cases of learners who begin to learn certain language items, trying to decode the complex process in light of pschotypology and markedness theory. Data are collected through sixty college students in Harbin. There are three methods for data collection: questionnaire, grammatical judgment task and writing samples. The results indicate that: 1) in a certain linguistic point, the target language will be difficult to acquire if the target language has a much more language distance. 2) in a certain linguistic point, the target language will be difficult to acquire if the target language is more marked than the native language. 3) English learners are less inclined to be affected by pschotypology and markedness with the development of English ability.