Sensitivity to L2 Inflectional Morphology in LESLLA Learners: Effects of Learner and Target Word Characteristics
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2025-08-18
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en
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Many learners struggle with L2 inflectional morphology. This thesis contributes to existing theories concerning this phenomenon by re-analysing data from a previous study. In that study, LESLLA learners with differing L1s and differing L2 proficiency levels performed a picture selection task that tested their sensitivity to nominal and verbal plural inflection in Dutch, their L2. This thesis expands on the previous study by using d prime as a measure of sensitivity and by fitting GLMM models. The role of learner characteristics (L1 and L2 level) and target word characteristics (word frequency and word-final consonant) in sensitivity to plural inflection was studied. Analyses were performed separately for nominal and verbal plural inflection. L1 affected performance on verbal inflectional items only, whereas L2 level affected performance on nominal inflectional items only. Target word characteristics were less important than learner characteristics. No effect for word frequency was found, and only a limited effect for word-final consonant. The results suggest a minor L1 effect, disagreeing with influential theories on L2 inflectional morphology. They do, however, mostly align with theories oriented specifically to LESLLA learners.
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