Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Prior studies of Second Language Acquisition have identified two forces that shape L2 production: cross-linguistic influence and L2 developmental universals. While past studies have focused on the acquisition of target structures, the distribution of structures in learner language production may still exhibit influence from these two forces. To disentangle the two kinds of impact on the distribution of linguistic structures in natural L2 production, we took a machine learning approach, leveraging over twenty typological and syntactic complexity features from five languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and Korean). By comparing linguistically informed features that characterize 1) each language based on native data, 2) each language based on L2 production from multiple L1 background, and 3) speakers of different L1 background writing in the same L2, we identified the structural features that capture the developmental universal impact and those that reflect L1 influence. Our findings reveal the complex, bidirectional, and asymmetrical interplay of language typology, cross-linguistic influence, and language development.