A crucial component of child language acquisition is successful generalization. First, a speaker must acquire abstract knowledge of how a particular linguistic-structure conveys meaning, and use this knowledge to generalize the structure to new lexical-items. For example, a speaker can use abstract knowledge of a SUBJECT-VERB-OBJECT structure to produce a sentence such as The man rolled the ball, even if the verb roll has never been encountered in this structure before. Second, a learner must appropriately restrict ‘overgeneralizations’ whereby a structure is used with an unsuitable verb (e.g. *The man fell the boy). The most prominent theories regarding restriction of overgeneralizations are based on frequency of use and (semantic, phonological or pragmatic) compatibility between the item and construction. Since developmental evidence for these accounts is mostly limited to the judgment paradigm, which is unsuitable for testing children aged 5 and under, the aim of this thesis was to examine whether these restriction mechanisms are used by children as young as 3 or 4 – whose generalization mechanisms are at an earlier stage of development - and to develop new paradigms for doing so. Study 1 used a production priming paradigm to examine children’s (aged 3-4; 5-6) restrictions of verbal un- prefixation (e.g., *unbend). Children’s production probability of verbs in un- form (e.g., *unbend) was negatively predicted by the frequency of the target verb in bare form (i.e., bend/s/ed/ing) and by the frequency of synonyms to a verb’s un- form (e.g., straighten for *unbend). Additionally, grammaticality judgments from older children (aged 5-6) revealed that preferences for un- forms were positively related to the extent to which the verb’s semantics overlapped with a covert, probabilistic semantic “cryptotype” of meanings thought to be shared by verbs that are grammatical in un- form (e.g., tie, pack, twist, screw, cover). Study 2 investigated whether overgeneralization errors in the domain of English past-tense (i.e., when ‘regular’ inflections are applied to verbs that require ‘irregular’ inflection; e.g., *sleeped, *throwed) are best attributed to analogy across exemplars, or to a default, “add –ed” rule applied regardless of a verb’s memorized associations. Past-tense forms of novel verbs were elicited by showing children (aged 3-4; 5-6; 6-7; 9-10) animations of an animal performing a novel action described with a novel verb (e.g., gezz; chake) and asking what the animal ‘did yesterday’. A verb’s likelihood of receiving regular inflection (e.g., gezzed, chaked) was positively associated with its phonological similarity to existing regular verbs, consistent with the analogy-based approach. Study 3 investigated the suitability of an online measure of sentence processing, namely Event Related Potentials (ERP), to investigate the role of verb-frequency in restricting transitive overgeneralizations. In line with previous studies, ‘P600’ and ‘LAN’ components were evoked in response to overgeneralization errors. However, the magnitudes of these components were not sensitive to a manipulation of verb-frequency (e.g., *The clown laughed the boy vs. *The clown giggled the boy), raising doubt toward the suitability of ERP for examining the relative acceptability of overgeneralization errors. Overall, the research indicates that even young children’s generalizations are sensitive to the linguistic input (i.e., statistical regularities and generalized semantic or phonological patterns of use) and are not well explained by a system of abstract rules that act on discrete categories, whether this applies to syntactic categories (e.g., add -ed to any instance of the category “VERB”) or discrete verb classes (e.g., a narrow-range rule that acts invariably on any verb that is part of an ‘alternating’ verb-class).

This study investigates error fossilisation in the written English of Xhosa - speaking students. It is hypothesised that there is no statistically significant difference in the language errors of two groups of Grade 10 and Grade 12 students. Two randomly selected groups of 30 Grade 10 and 30 Grade 12 students in a rural senior secondary school in the Eastern Cape province were required to write two essays, of which the first two hundred words of each essay were marked. A frequency count of errors was done and comparisons were made. The findings indicate that the Grade 12s consistently made fewer errors. However, the difference is only statistically significant in the case of prepositions and concord, and is insignificant in tenses, pronouns and articles. The findings also show evidence of fossilisation given the persistence of some of the errors. Certain features in the student's language were not eradicated by the additional two years exposure to English. / English Studies / M.A. (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages)

論文提要內容： 本研究旨在探討分析台灣國中生使役動詞的使用情況，主要探討學生使用使役動詞的錯誤情況，分析錯誤原因及調查在不同英文能力的學生使用上是否存在顯著差異。 此研究採取質及量的研究。質的研究包含(1)使役動詞的補語用法(2)使役動詞的意義及用法(3)學生在使用使役動詞上的錯誤分析。量的研究包含(1)使役動詞補語的錯誤率(2)使役動詞意義及使用上的錯誤率(3)高中低程度三組中顯著變化情形。 結果顯示學生在使役動詞補語使用上常用錯非限定動詞及誤用限定動詞，此外，本研究也發現學生在選擇正確使役動詞上錯誤率高於使役動詞補語使用。分析原因如下：(1)過度規則化(2)負向轉移(3)教學引導(4)學生語言知識不足(5)語言同化。此研究也發現高中低三組在使用使役動詞補語上確實有顯著差異，然而在使役意義上(coercive sense of make-causative)、未提出但已知接受動作者意義上(unmentioned perceptible causee sense of make-causative) 、 及服務框架意義上(service frame sense of have-causative) 高中低程度學生的表現並無不同。 / Abstract The purpose of this study aims to analyze the use of periphrastic causative verbs in Junior high students’ writing performance and to understand students’ difficulty in learning and using periphrastic causative verbs. The form of periphrastic causative verbs and grammatical characteristics are easy to remember. However, subtle meanings and usage are somewhat difficult. This study adopts qualitative and quantitative analyses. The qualitative analysis includes: (1) the verb complement form of periphrastic causative verbs, (2) the meaning and functions of periphrastic causative verbs, and (3) the factors that influence students’ erroneous uses of periphrastic causative verbs. The quantitative analysis comprises: (1) the inaccuracy rate of the use of every periphrastic causative construction in the tests for form and meaning, (2) the distribution of periphrastic causative verb errors in form and meaning and use and (3) multiple comparisons among accuracy at the three proficiency levels. The results of this study are summarized as follows: students have trouble distinguishing finite verb and non-finite complement verbs with respect to the form errors. They also have lower awareness of the differences of each causative verb concerning the meaning errors. The factors affecting their incorrect responses are (1) overgeneralization, (2) negative L1 transfer, (3) teaching induced errors, (4) learners’ ignorance of rule restrictions and (5) learners’ strategies of communication and assimilation. In addition, there are significant differences among the three groups with regards to the make +O +V, have +O +V, let +O +V and have +O +p.p. in the form test and the non-coercive sense of make-causative, the hierarchical relation of have-causative and the permissive sense of let-causative in the meaning and use tests. However, there is no significant difference between the three groups’ scores of meaning and use with the coercive sense of make-causative, the unmentioned causee sense of make-causative and the service frame sense of have-causative.

This study investigates error fossilisation in the written English of Xhosa - speaking students. It is hypothesised that there is no statistically significant difference in the language errors of two groups of Grade 10 and Grade 12 students. Two randomly selected groups of 30 Grade 10 and 30 Grade 12 students in a rural senior secondary school in the Eastern Cape province were required to write two essays, of which the first two hundred words of each essay were marked. A frequency count of errors was done and comparisons were made. The findings indicate that the Grade 12s consistently made fewer errors. However, the difference is only statistically significant in the case of prepositions and concord, and is insignificant in tenses, pronouns and articles. The findings also show evidence of fossilisation given the persistence of some of the errors. Certain features in the student's language were not eradicated by the additional two years exposure to English. / English Studies / M.A. (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages)

This is a case study that focuses on the oral proficiency in English manifested by the 4-year-old sonof the author. He speaks Swedish as his L1 like his both parents but has been exposed to Englishsince he was one year old from using a tablet. The child’s spoken production was recorded andtranscribed with a focus on the plural-forms and the genitive. An important field that this case studyis motivated by is how child language development may be connected to the concept of innatism,that language is based on innate principles (Lightbown & Spada, 2013:20) as it has been found that anumber of languages are acquired according to predictable patterns and processes (Moskowitz,1994:621-627) such as a the u-shaped learning process and over-generalization which has beenfound when investigating both L1 and L2 acquisition (Abrahamsson, 2013:663). The aim of thisstudy is to find possible similarities within the learning process: whether L2 acquisition follows thesame developmental patterns as in L1 acquisition by analyzing the recordings mainly targeting theplural and the genitive morphemes produced by a 4-year-old L2 speaker of English. Findings in thisresearch revealed that the child demonstrated a similar developmental pattern in the form of theu-shaped learning process (Abrahamsson, 2013:663).

This study aims to investigate possible factors contributing to subject-verb agreement errors in Swedish junior and senior high school students' English written production. The sample data is collected from the Swedish Learner English Corpus (SLEC), which comprises student texts produced in a classroom setting. The texts are randomly chosen but evenly distributed in terms of binary gender, school year, and type of high school program. In this study, the texts included in the scope are written by students attending a Swedish-speaking school with Swedish as their first language. Errors are classified as overgeneralization or transfer and further classified in relation to the subject type, the verb type, and the distance between the subject and the verb. The classification of all correct instances of subject-verb agreement is also performed to further investigate possible error explanations. A total of 41 agreement errors were found in 24 texts written by students in the 9th and 11th grades. The results show that overgeneralization is more frequent than transfer errors. Overgeneralization suggests that the students are aware of the third-singular form but do not always apply it correctly, while transfer errors show a potential lack of awareness or attention to the form. In both cases, the errors indicate that these students have not automatized the principle yet. Errors are often related to subject types “a pronoun” or “a noun/noun phrase" and the verb be, which is the most frequently used verb. Most of the errors occur when the subject and the verb are in immediate contact, and more than half of them involve a relative pronoun as subject, which indicates that the learners have misinterpreted the grammatical principle or have not fully acquired it. Overuse of the third-person singular form can also be an effect of teaching and explicit learning, which makes learners apply the form whenever it seems possible and relevant.

The aim of the study is to find out to what extent Swedish learners of English, in the first year of upper secondary school, make prepositional errors in their written production, and to what extent these errors can be attributed to negative transfer, overgeneralization and simplification by conducting an Error Analysis. A comparison between gender and type of program, academic and vocational, is made to find out in which type of program most errors appear and if there is any difference in terms of gender.  The data is annotated from the Swedish Learner English Corpus (SLEC), which consists of argumentative essays written by Swedish learners of English, and it consists of 24 randomly selected texts based on the variables binary gender, type of program, Swedish as their L1, school year, and English course. All the texts selected are written by students in the first year of upper secondary school studying the course English 5. The results of the study reveal that Swedish learners of English struggle with prepositional usage. In total, 649 prepositions were identified in the 24 texts. Out of these, 72 (11.09%) were used incorrectly. The most frequently used prepositions involved in these errors are of, for, in, to, and with. Most errors appear when prepositional phrases function as post-modifiers in noun phrases. Substitution is, by far, the most common type of error found, meaning that the students replace the correct preposition with an incorrect one. The results thus show that the students seem to be aware that a preposition should be used although they fail to choose the correct one. Female students make more prepositional errors than male students; similarly, students attending vocational programs make more prepositional errors than students attending academic programs. Most errors are cases of overgeneralizations, followed by negative transfer from Swedish, and simplification. However, many of the errors can still be attributed to negative transfer which suggests that, even though Swedish and English are similar languages which could lead to positive transfer, this does not seem to fully apply to prepositions.

It is a general belief in Japan that the English /s/ and /ʃ/ before high front vowels (as in "see" and "she") are problematic for Japanese ESL (English-as-a-second-language) learners. Some research has also reported the /s/ and /ʃ/ confusion by Japanese ESL learners. Their pronunciation errors are often explained based on phonetics, but there are reasons to believe that the learners’ knowledge of the phonemes of the target words is at fault. This study examines 1) whether monolingual Japanese speakers distinguish the [si] and [ʃi] syllables in both perception and production in the Japanese contexts and 2) what would be the sources of Japanese speakers’ challenges in mastering the distinction between [si] and [ʃi] in their English production if Japanese speakers can produce and perceive the difference between these syllables. This study conducted two experiments. In the first experiment, 93 monolingual Japanese speakers between the ages of 17 and 89 in and around Tôkyô read aloud the written stimuli that had [si] and [ʃi] in the Japanese contexts, repeated the sound stimuli that had [si] and [ʃi] in the Japanese contexts, and listened to the [si:] and [ʃi:] syllables in isolation recorded by a native speaker of Canadian English. The results showed that the participants all distinguished [si] and [ʃi] in both perception and production regardless of their ages. Based on these results, I hypothesized that the [s] and [ʃ] confusion by Japanese ESL learners is caused by misunderstanding, rather than an inability to articulate these sounds. In the second experiment, 27 Japanese ESL students were recorded reading an English passage. The passage contains /s/ (7 times) and /ʃ/ (11 times) before high front vowels. After the reading, the participants were taught the basic English phonological system and the symbol-sound correspondence rules such as “s”-/s/ and “sh”-/ʃ/. The lesson lasted 40 minutes during which the participants were also interviewed to find out their awareness of the symbol-sound correspondence. No articulation explanations were given during the lesson. After the lesson, the participants read the same passage. The results showed that /s/ and /ʃ/ were mispronounced 39 and 67 times respectively in total by the 27 participants before the lesson, but only 7 and 19 times after the lesson. These changes are statistically significant. Moreover, the interview during the lesson revealed that the participants lacked phonological awareness in English as well as the knowledge of the symbol-sound correspondence rules. This study concluded that many of the mispronunciations by Japanese ESL learners, including /s/ and /ʃ/, can be solved by teaching the English phonics rules and some basic phonological rules without teaching the articulation of these sounds.