Study Of Native Language Transfer From The Perspectives Of Psychotypology And Markedness

With the development of cognitive theory, language transfer as a complicated mental process has beenaccepted, and considerable advances have been made by many researchers. After experiencing threeperiods, the perspective of language transfer study shifted from a behaviorist framework to a cognitiveframework, and linguistic researchers have a better and more comprehensive understanding of languagetransfer. In the study of all constraints of language transfer, psychotypology and Markedness seem to be themost important factors to illustrate the cross-linguistic influence in language transfer, and the twoconstraints has become the problems that linguists and psycholinguists have been more concerned.This paper studies native language transfer from cognitive perspective based on Kellerman’psychotypology and another important constraint: Markedness theory. In order to explore the effects ofMarkedness theory and Psychotypology on native language transfer, the paper tries to analyze the learners’complex mental process by focusing on five linguistic items that learners begin to learn and finding thepredictive power of psychotypology and Markedness theory and the relationship between them in nativelanguage transfer based on the theory framework. The five linguistic items which are likely to cause5errortypes:(a) confusion in meaning,(b) confusion in verb transitivity,(c) lack of control of the copula,(d)inability to use the there be structure,(e) failure to use the relative clause. Data are collected through80college students in North West Normal University. There are four methods for the data collection:questionnaire, sentence creation, translation and grammatical judgment task.The results indicate that Markedness and psychotypology contribute greatly to Native languagetransfer. When the perceived language distance is large, learners will not transfer their native languagefeatures, and the target language features will be correctly acquired or underproduction may occur. Whenthe perceived language distance is small, negatively transfer is likely to occur. English linguistic itemswhich are more marked will be difficult to learn. Markedness seems to contribute more significantly tonative language transfer than psychotypology does. English learners are less inclined to be affected bypsychotypology and Markedness with the accumulation of English knowledge.