| This dissertation investigates conceptual transfer as a constraint on the acquisition of English locative prepositions. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether lexical-semantic transfer and prototypicality effects adequately account for the specific problems which native Japanese speakers encounter in the acquisition of three English prepositions. The question under investigation is whether interaction of native language spatial schemata, and language-specific semantic and pragmatic strategies associated with two Japanese locatives: de and ni, inhibits the attainment of native-like usage of in, on and at.; A preliminary study was conducted which suggested that English and Japanese speakers do not conceive of spatial relationships in the same way. Motivated by the results of the preliminary study, the main study was conducted to test the hypothesis that errors in prepositional usage are symptomatic of two fundamental problems: (1) transfer of an L1 lexical underspecification strategy, which results in overgeneralization of the preposition at, and (2) a failure to construct and implement language-appropriate mental representations of spatial concepts and spatial relations.; The study was conducted in two parts. First, a sentence priming task and a grammaticality judgment ranking task were administered to a group of adult Japanese students studying English in the United States. Next, a non-verbal spatial categorization task was administered to both native English-speaking and native-Japanese speaking college students.; The validity of a general theory of lexical-semantic transfer and a theory of prototype transfer was confirmed, especially among low-level learners. However, the results suggest that Japanese do not merely transfer lexicon; they also transfer native language semantic and pragmatic strategies. The data also confirmed that English and Japanese speakers often construct very different schematizations of the same real world spatial event. It appears that these culturally-specific viewpoints are also subject to transfer, resulting in similar prepositional usage errors regardless of the level of the learner. |
