Errors with be, whether whether whether whether whether whether whether whether omission omission omission omission omission omission omission omission (e.g., John happy) or overuse (i.e., be-insertion; e.g., John is love Mary), have received particular attention in L2 acquisition studies exploring L1 transfer. This study investigates such errors in the context of L3 acquisition, focusing on L1 transfer. L1-Chinese (n = 34) and L1-Russian (n = 34) children with L2 Korean completed an elicitation production task designed to explore their use of English be. The study resulted in two main findings. First, L1-Russian children showed more omission errors than proficiency-matching L1-Chinese children, possibly due to an L1 transfer given that copula in Russian are dropped in the present tense. Second, L1-Chinese learners used be-insertion more frequently than proficiency-matching L1-Russian children, possibly due to using be for more functions (as a topic marker and an inflectional morpheme), as other research has shown for L2-English learners with topic-prominent L1s. Based on the findings, the study discusses some pedagogical implications.

This paper examines the putative universality of the Overt Pronoun Constraint (OPC) (Montalbetti, 1984) postulated for pro-drop languages by observing the interpretational status of overt and null pronouns in the context of quantified antecedents that contrasts between Korean (pro-drop language) and English (non pro-drop language). In pro-drop languages, an overt pronoun cannot have a bound variable interpretation when the antecedent is a quantified NP (e.g., everyone, someone). Twenty three Korean learners of English took a forced-choice picture task, in which they had to select one of the two pictures that best depicted a sentence they heard that carried ambiguous meanings. Results showed that Korean speakers accepted a quantified antecedent with Korean overt pronoun ku, violating the OPC. The imperfect knowledge of the OPC by Korean speakers was attributed to the influence of the English overt pronoun he on the Korean overt pronoun ku. Pedagogical implications are discussed on the explicit instructions on the meanings of lexicon used in the OPC construction.

The Interface Hypothesis (Sorace, 2011; Sorace & Filiaci, 2006; Sorace & Serratrice, 2009; Tsimpli & Sorace, 2006, among others) states that the grammar external interface is more vulnerable for advanced L2ers or bilinguals than the grammar internal interface, and L1 discourse influence is one factor responsible for their residual difficulty (Sorace, 2005; Sorace, Serratrice, Filiaci & Baldo, 2009). Their study, however, did not disentangle interface effects from L1 influence and it is unclear whether the residual difficulty of advanced L2ers is due to interface effects or L1 influence. The results of the present study which teases the two factors apart show that L1 influence is stronger than interface effects. The results without L1 influence show that the syntax-discourse interface is more vulnerable than the syntax-morphology interface, supporting the Interface Hypothesis. This study examines two sets of data, cross-sectional and longitudinal, on overpassivization of L2 English unaccusative verbs by Chinese and Korean speakers.

This study investigated the influence of L1-specific constraints on L2 perception. In particular, we examined the effect of the unreleased coda constraint in L1 on Korean learners’ perception of word final palatal sibilants across two proficiency levels, i.e., low vs. high. Our findings from a perception experiment showed that Korean learners, especially the low group learners, tended to hear the illusory vowel /i/ after a word final palatal sibilant. Thus, the low group learners had a difficulty in discriminating the contrasts of /ʃ/ vs. /ʃi/, /ʧ/ vs. /ʧi/, and /ʤ/ vs. /ʤi/. According to the perception experiment, the low group learners’ illusory vowel perception rates increased as frication noise of the word final palatal sibilant got longer. Additionally, the low group learners were not influenced by the relative duration of the vowel /i/ in perceiving the vowel. Rather, their vowel responses were more likely to be influenced by the frication duration of a word final palatal sibilant. The study revealed that L1 constraints are significant factors influencing L2 perception.

The purposes of this study are to understand the influence of L1 on learning Korean negation and a developmental sequence of Korean negation forms through examining English and Japanese learners of Korean. In particular, we aim to investigate whether linguistic distance between L1 and L2 affects learning Korean negation. Forty English and twenty Japanese students who were learning Korean in colleges participated in the written production test. As a control group, forty Korean native speakers took the written test. We observed that the English and the Japanese groups produced less number of long form negation sentences than the Korean adult group did. The English group showed a developmental pattern to advance from short to long forms, while the Japanese group demonstrated the opposite tendency. These results suggested that an influence of L1 negation structure on L2 learning coexisted with that of a general developmental sequence. The pedagogical implications of the findings are two-fold:1) the findings would provide practical suggestions for instructing Korean negation forms in multilingual classrooms and 2) the findings would help researchers and language teachers understand the learning patterns of Korean by L2 learners.

The present study investigates the collocations of the first person plural possessive pronoun in order to identify L1 influence in Korean EFL learners' writing, in comparison with native English speakers’ writing. From a cognitive linguistic perspective, this learner corpus research focuses on the use of the first person pronoun OUR in English, which seems to be negatively transferred by somewhat peculiar usages of the Korean equivalent pronoun wuli. The contrastive interlanguage analysis first shows that Korean learners significantly overuse first person plural pronouns whereas they significantly underuse first person singular pronouns, compared to native English speakers. Second, it also indicates that the distribution of frequencies of the ‘OUR + noun’ collocations according to a classification based on the Sejong Corpus seems very similar in both corpora, and that the frequencies are likely to be dependent upon specific individual collocates. Third, Korean learners appear to particularly overuse six specific ‘OUR + noun’ collocations rather than ‘MY + noun’ collocations, which can be argued to be empirical evidence of L1 influence. The findings of the present study are expected to provide valuable implications to English language teaching in classroom in Korea.