LANGUAGE DISTANCE AND L3 JAPANESE ACQUISITION IN MORPHOSYNTACTIC MODULE

Overview & Synopsis

This study applies mathematical linguistics to explore how language distance plays an essential role inthird language acquisition in terms of a morphosyntactic module. Data were drawn from 3410 essayswritten in Japanese by low, middle and high levels of learners from 12 first-language (L1) backgroundswho acquire English as a second language (L2)-interlanguage and Japanese as a third language (L3). Thefindings indicate that (a) mean dependency distance is an efficient indicator for syntactic complexity ofwriting proficiency. In both elementary and intermediate groups, learners of highly agglutinativelanguages are likely to show higher dependency distance than learners from isolated-language and fusionlanguage backgrounds. (b) The frequency and dependency distance are distributed in Power LawFunction. Fitting Right truncated Good to the dependency distances indicates that the values of theparameter p ascend as the degree of agglutination of learners’ mother tongue increases. (c) The syntacticcomplexity in multi-background Japanese learners’ essays highlights that no matter how diverse thelearners’ native and target languages are, the syntax is always constrained by universal law, namely,minimising dependency distance. This is in accordance with existing findings in second languageacquisition of inflectional languages.