A processing strength account of language transfer

The processing strength account of language transfer is a performance-based account which predicts the occurrence of errors in the second language (L2) production of closed-class morphemes by speakers whose first language (L1) speech production systems do not process for information required by the L2 production system during the production of those closed-class morphemes. It claims that in L2 development a processing sub-module is added to the existing speech production system in order to process for the information required by the L2. This addition is assumed to create a processing strength inequality between the added sub-module and the preexisting speech production system which results in processing failures and probabilistic error in the L2 speech. The claims of the processing strength account were tested on the L2 marking of scGENDER and scCASE for English third-person-singular pronouns by native speakers of Chinese. Native speakers of Chinese were chosen for two reasons: (1) Chinese pronouns are marked for neither scGENDER nor scCASE, scAND (2) the Chinese speech production system processes for scCASE but not scGENDER. Two experimental tasks were conducted on two overlapping groups of undergraduate English majors at South China University of Technology, Guangzhou. The first task was a sentence elicitation task involving pictures and sentential primes. The second task was a story telling task using a story book without words. The tasks were designed to test four hypotheses. The first hypothesis was that the difference in the Chinese speech production system in terms of processing for scCASE and scGENDER would result in differences in the accuracy of scCASE and scGENDER marking in the English. The second hypothesis was that the error in scGENDER-marking would be performance-based rather than competence-based. The third and fourth hypotheses were that processing strength would play a role in the error behavior. The Third hypothesis predicted that error rates would be affected by both priming and attentional demands. The fourth hypothesis was that excitatory and inhibitory primes would have differential effects at various levels of processing proficiency. The first two hypotheses were strongly supported by the results. There was substantial support for the third hypothesis and indirect support for the last hypothesis.