Japanese/Korean Linguistics

The current study focuses on the second language (L2) acquisition of bi-clausal wh-questions in Japanese by English-speaking learners. While the scope of bi-clausal wh-questions is determined by the position of the wh-phrase in English, in Japanese it is determined by the type of morphosyntactic marker (Complementizer -to vs. Question-marking particle -ka). Considering these crosslinguistic differences between the two languages, we examined how L2 learners acquire the wh-scope-marking strategy in Japanese, adapting the design of previous studies (Lieberman et al. 2006; Umeda 2008). Our results indicate that mastering the interpretive difference between the two morphosyntactic markers is challenging for many English-speaking learners, although a subset of learners was successful. As we did not observe any L1 transfer effects, we speculate that the challenges of mastering the property may come from other factors such as complexity of the structure and lack of exposure to bi-clausal wh-questions in the classroom context.