From Wh-Movement to Wh-In-Situ Acquisition of I-To-C Movement in English Interrogative Constructions by Kurdish Learners

Abstract

In this study, the effect of Kurdish (Behdini variety) as an L1 on L2 learners' acquisition of English Wh-movement in interrogation will be investigated through comparatively taking into account the most current syntactically-based generative models of Second Language Acquisition, including Full Access/Full Transfer (FA/FT) (Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996), the Interpretability Hypothesis (Tsimpli & Dimitrakopoulou, 2007), and the Variational Model of Language Acquisition (Yang, 2002). A Grammaticality Judgement Elicitation Task is conducted in the form of a surveying questionnaire to gather data among L2 learners to establish their acquisition process of interrogation in English. The informants are students of the English and Translation Departments at the College of Languages - University of Duhok, English being their second language. The data are analysed using mixed-effects modeling by employing the lmer package (version 3.3.1) with logit link function and binomial variance for the judgement data in R, an open-source language and environment for statistical computing. The results of the study show that there is a transfer from first language into the second language due to the finding that most participants, disregarding their proficiency level, failed to reject the ungrammatical sentences in almost all the categories. The study finds support for the FT/FA proposal, where L1 transfer occurs, in addition to L2 input and access to universal grammar