477650
2013
SLR29410.1177/0267658313477650Second Language ResearchSpinner
second
language
research
Article
The second language
acquisition of number and
gender in Swahili: A Feature
Reassembly approach
Second Language Research
29(4) 455­–479
© The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/0267658313477650
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Patti Spinner
Michigan State University, USA
Abstract
Much of the recent discussion surrounding the second language acquisition of morphology has
centered on the question of whether learners can acquire new formal features. Lardiere’s (2008,
2009) Feature Reassembly approach offers a new direction for research in this area by emphasizing
the challenges presented by crosslinguistic differences in the overt expression of formal features.
In this study, I examine the acquisition of number and gender in Swahili by speakers of English
and explore how the data can be described by a number of current approaches, including
the Full Transfer Full Access Hypothesis (Schwartz and Sprouse, 1996), the Representational
Deficit Hypothesis (e.g. Hawkins and Chan, 1997), and the Feature Reassembly approach. The
results of an elicited production task and a written gender-assignment task indicate that learners
have difficulty detecting the number feature on Swahili noun prefixes, and because of this they
are initially unsuccessful at marking plurals. The findings are best described under a Feature
Reassembly approach. I suggest some directions for expanding the Feature Reassembly approach
in future research.
Keywords
formal features, grammatical gender, L2 acquisition of morphology, number, Swahili
I Introduction
In the past 15 years there has been great interest in the second language acquisition of
formal features such as grammatical gender, number and tense. Much of this work has
focused on whether or not second language learners are able to acquire new features that
are not instantiated in the first language (L1) (e.g. Hawkins and Hattori, 2006; Hawkins
and Liszka, 2003; Haznedar and Schwartz, 1997; Lardiere, 1998; White et al., 2004).
Corresponding author:
Patti Spinner, 619 Red Cedar Road, B-258 Wells Hall, Department of Linguistics and Languages,
Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48823, USA.
Email: [email protected]
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Second Language Research 29(4)
However, recently Lardiere (2008, 2009) has argued that the most fruitful line of investigation deals not simply with the presence or absence of features, but with the languagespecific configurations of features. That is, the crucial challenge for learners is first to
detect how – and on which particular lexical items – features are spelled out in the native
language / target language (TL), and then to ‘reassemble’ the feature matrices appropriately from the L1 configuration (if they are present in the L1 in some form) to the second
language (L2) configuration. Lardiere has framed this as a return to contrastive analysis
(Lado, 1957), but with a modern understanding of the linguistic system. The approach
moves beyond the perhaps overly simplistic question ‘New features: Yes or no?’ and
encourages a more nuanced and detailed examination of what are surely complex learning tasks involving a variety of factors.
In this study, I consider a case in which learners are acquiring two features in the TL
that are bundled together on a single morphological form: one is present in the first language and the other is not. The learners are speakers of English who are acquiring grammatical gender and number marking in Swahili, both of which are expressed on noun
prefixes. Number is present in English but grammatical gender is not. The goal of this
article is to examine how the Feature Reassembly approach might provide a framework
to describe the acquisition of Swahili by these learners, and whether there are advantages over previous approaches that mainly focus on whether or not new features can
be acquired.
II Previous work on formal features
Until recently, there have been two main schools of thought on the L2 acquisition of
formal features. One hypothesis states that second language learners cannot acquire new
formal features that are not instantiated in the L1: the Failed Functional Features
Hypothesis or Representational Deficit Hypothesis (RDH) (Hawkins and Chan, 1997;
Smith and Tsimpli, 1995). On most recent accounts, the difficulty is predicted to be limited to uninterpretable features; that is, those features that serve a purely grammatical
purpose, such as agreement marking (Hawkins and Casillas, 2008; Tsimpli and
Dimitrakopoulou, 2007). The key point of the RDH is that learners lack the syntactic
representation of features not present in the L1 and are therefore unable to comprehend
or produce associated morphosyntactic forms and structures accurately, although learners may compensate by using the L1 grammar to approximate them (Hawkins and
Hattori, 2006). This proposal is compatible with the Fundamental Difference Hypothesis
(Bley-Vroman, 1990, 2009), which states that second language learners’ linguistic system is fundamentally different from that of first language learners.
The second hypothesis is the Full Transfer Full Access hypothesis (FTFA) (Schwartz
and Sprouse, 1996), which claims that L2 learners can acquire features that are not present in the L1. In order to explain the errors that learners often make in the marking of
these features, many supporters of FTFA also argue for a version of the Missing Surface
Inflection Hypothesis (MSIH) (Haznedar and Schwartz, 1997; Prévost and White, 2000).
The MSIH argues that learners’ errors on morphological forms are not due to a representational (syntactic) deficit, but rather difficulties in ‘mapping’ between a morphological/
lexical component and the syntactic component. Here, the key point is that learners can
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eventually acquire new features (and therefore the appropriate syntactic representations),
although they may use underspecified default forms when there is performance pressure,
phonological interference from the L1, and so on.
Lardiere (2008, 2009) raises new issues about the acquisition of features. Specifically,
she argues that one of the most pervasive challenges for language learners may not be the
acquisition of new features, but rather the acquisition of features that are configured differently from in the native language. Importantly, she also questions whether some
widely-held assumptions about the presence or absence of features in particular languages are accurate. Lardiere presents several examples from Chinese to illustrate her
point. For instance, it is usually assumed that Chinese lacks definiteness and number (or
at least plurality), so that when Chinese speakers acquire English, they have to acquire
these new features ‘from scratch’. However, Chinese has a plural/collective marker,
-men, which is used in definite contexts. Its use is very limited, but its presence in Chinese
makes it problematic to claim that Chinese completely lacks plurality and definiteness.
Viewed this way, the task for Chinese speakers acquiring English is very different than
generally has been thought. If we assume a full-transfer hypothesis, where the initial
state of acquisition is the L1 grammar (as with FTFA), Chinese speakers must ‘de-link’
the definite and plural features in their interlanguage and reassemble the two features
onto English articles and the -s suffix. Presumably before any of that can happen, the
learners have to detect the plural and definiteness markers in English, so that they can
begin the process of delinking and reassembly.
One can imagine a number of factors that could cause difficulty at any point in the
process of detection and reassembly. First, the TL feature might be expressed on a different grammatical class or in a different location (e.g. prefix, infix or suffix). The TL feature could also be fused on a single morpheme with one or more other features, one that
is or is not present in the first language. This situation could also be reversed: in the case
where several L1 features are conflated on a single morpheme but expressed on separate
morphemes in the TL, as with Lardiere’s example of the Chinese suffix -men. The
research agenda for the Feature Reassembly approach could involve the investigation of
these and other conditions.
Several researchers have begun to conduct investigations in a Feature Reassembly
framework. Dekydtspotter and Renaud (2009) examined the detection and reassembly
of the uninterpretable gender feature on French past participles by speakers of English
with a self-paced moving-window task. They found that for fourth-semester learners
there were longer reading times in contexts with errors in gender agreement, indicating
feature checking. Interestingly, for second semester learners, there were also shorter
latencies for masculine forms in a feminine context, which Dekydtspotter and Renaud
argue indicates the underspecification of masculine, as well as longer latencies with
feminine forms in masculine contexts, which they argue indicates a feature clash. The
researchers argue that these asymmetries in the acquisition of past participles indicate
that an uninterpretable gender feature is incorporated onto the French past participle in
the learners’ interlanguage. In a follow-up study, Renaud (2010) found similar results
for a group of learners acquiring past participles with ‘silent’ morphology (that is, markers that are overt in writing but not in speech), which presumably is more difficult to
detect in the input.
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Second Language Research 29(4)
In this study, I take a somewhat different approach, focusing on the degree to which
the Feature Reassembly approach is useful in describing the acquisition of a particular
set of TL contrasts. I consider the case where a TL feature that is also present in the L1
is conflated with a feature that is not present in the L1. In addition, the TL feature is
expressed in a different location than is typical in the first language (a prefix rather than
a suffix). Specifically, I consider the case where English speakers, whose L1 represents
number but not gender, acquire Swahili, in which gender and number are both expressed
on a noun prefix. Previous research has suggested that the conflation of a feature present
in the L1 with a feature absent in the L1 can cause difficulties for a learner; Spinner and
Juffs (2008) speculated that an Italian-speaking learner failed to mark gender on German
determiners appropriately partially because German gender is conflated with case marking. Case is not marked overtly on determiners in Italian, while gender is.
III Previous work on nominal marking: Gender and
number
There is a large body of work on the acquisition of the grammatical gender feature. In
particular, there has been debate over whether or not adult L2 learners can acquire gender
if it is not present in the first language. While some studies have demonstrated that learners can produce and respond to grammatical gender accurately (e.g. White et al., 2004),
there is little debate that grammatical gender is difficult for L2 learners and subject to
considerable error. Some studies have shown that gender appears to be particularly
problematic for those whose L1 lacks it (Franceschina, 2005; McCarthy, 2008;
Sabourin et al., 2006).
In contrast, the acquisition of number marking has seemed less problematic, at least
for those speakers with number in the first language who are acquiring similar systems.
Several studies focusing on marking within the DP have found that, for such speakers,
number marking is generally accurate, even when gender accuracy is low (Spinner and
Juffs, 2008; White et al., 2004; but, for contrasting findings, see McCarthy, 2008).
However, it is important to note that most of this research has been carried out with the
acquisition of European languages, in which number marking on nouns has many similarities to that in English. In French and Spanish, the morpheme even takes the same
(written) shape, -s, as shown in (1).
1. les livre-s
los libro-s
‘the book-s’
In this study, I examine the acquisition of number marking that is expressed quite differently from in English.
1 Gender and number in Swahili
The Swahili gender system differs from the systems in most European languages in
several important ways. First, while European languages have two or three genders
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(usually masculine, feminine, and sometimes neuter), there are considerably more in
Swahili. Based on Carstens (1991, 1993, 2000, 2005) and Contini-Morava (2002),
every noun root in Swahili belongs to one of six genders. For each noun root, there is
one set of agreement markings for singular and a different set for plural; note that
Swahili shares this property with Italian, which also has gender-specific markers of
number. Traditionally, the singular and plural agreement systems are labeled as separate
noun classes: singular marking is labeled with odd numbers and plural marking with
even numbers. However, since each gender consists of noun roots with both singular
and plural agreement systems, I will refer to each gender as 1/2, 3/4, and so on.
Gender agreement in Swahili is marked on a wider range of elements than is typical
in European languages, including adjectives, numerals, pronouns, and subject and object
markers. Importantly, these agreement markers generally take the form of prefixes rather
than the suffixes that are more typical for European languages and for English.
Another important difference between Swahili and European languages is that in
Swahili gender agreement is marked as a prefix on the noun root itself. For example, the
sentence in (2) shows the noun root -tu ‘person’ with the noun prefix for gender 1/2 singular,
m- (traditionally labeled noun class ‘1’). Gender 1/2 singular agreement is also marked
on the adjective with the prefix m- and on the verb with the prefix a-.
2. M-tu m-refu a-na-soma.
1-person 1-tall 1.3rd-pres-read
‘The tall person is reading.’
(pres = present tense)
Because the root -tu belongs to gender 1/2, the plural marker for adjectives, numerals,
and verbs is wa-. Plural verbs in this class are traditionally labeled as the noun class ‘2’.
An example of plural marking is given in (3).
3. wa-tu wa-refu wa-wili wa-na-soma.
2-person 2-tall 2-two 2.3rd-pres-read
‘The two tall people are reading.’
A list of noun prefixes and agreement markers for adjectives and numerals is presented
in Table 1. Note that Swahili, unlike English, has a marker for singular nouns as well as
plural nouns. Also note that there is some homophony between classes: the noun prefix
for both singular 1/2 and 3/4 nouns is m-, and a number of genders have agreement
markers with the form m- or n-/ø on adjectives and numerals.
Another difference between Swahili and European languages involves the semantic
organization of the gender system. As Corbett (1991) observes, all gender systems, even
those that are mostly organized around formal properties such as noun endings, have
some members that can be classified according to semantic principles. In European languages, the relevant semantic principles usually involve natural gender, or biological sex
on animates. For example, in Spanish the gender system is mostly organized on a morphophonological basis; most nouns that end with -a are feminine, and most that end in -o
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Second Language Research 29(4)
Table 1. Gender agreement in Swahili.
Gender / number
Noun prefix
Example noun
Adjective and
numeral agreement
(not showing all
phonological variants)
1/2 singular
1/2 plural
3/4 singular
3/4 plural
5/6 singular
5/6 plural
7/8 singular
7/8 plural
9/10 singular
9/10 plural
11/14/10 singular
11/14/10 plural
m(w)- (and others)
wa- (and others)
mmiø, jimaki-, chviø, nø, nuø, n-
m-tu ‘person’
wa-tu ‘people’
m-ti ‘tree’
mi-ti ‘trees’
tunda ‘fruit’
ma-tunda ‘fruits’
ki-tabu ‘book’
vi-tabu ‘books’
eropleni ‘airplane’
eropleni ‘airplanes’
u-tambi ‘wick’
tambi ‘wicks’
mwammiø, jimaki-, chviø, nø, nu-, mø, n-
are masculine. Additionally, nouns that refer to animates with biological sex predictably
fall into either the masculine or feminine gender; e.g. the Spanish noun mujer ‘woman’
is feminine, and the noun hombre ‘man’ is masculine.
The semantic principles relevant to Swahili noun classes are somewhat debated by
Africanists. However, many agree that for most genders there are both nouns that adhere
to certain semantic principles and those that belong to the gender for seemingly arbitrary
reasons. This view is reflected in textbooks, which often provide semantic generalizations for each gender but add the caveat that many nouns fail to fit the pattern (see, for
example, Wilson, 1983). Contini-Morava (2002) refers to those adhering to clear semantic principles as ‘core’ and the others as ‘peripheral’, related to the core through chains
of metaphor or metonymy that may not be readily apparent. For instance, one of the core
semantic properties of gender 3/4 is trees; the words for ‘tree’ (mti) and ‘banana tree’
(mgomba) are in this gender. However, also in gender 3/4 are words such as ‘bag’ (mfuko)
and ‘loaf of bread’ (mkate), which are not part of the semantic core.
There are also several classes of nouns with grammatical functions that are generally
considered to be separate from these six classes. Nouns with the prefix ku- are infinitives,
deverbal nouns or gerunds; for instance, compare the verb -soma ‘read’ with the noun
kusoma ‘reading’. Nouns with the prefixes pa-, ku- and mu- are locatives indicating
proximity, indefinite location, or ‘withinness’ (Mohammed, 2001: 51). Augmentative
and diminutive forms have the same form as class 7/8 and 3/4 or 5/6 (e.g. kapu ‘basket’;
kikapu ‘little basket’, mkapu ‘large basket’).
Based on Carstens (1991, 1993, 2000, 2005), the representation of Swahili gender and
number is similar to the representation of gender and number in European languages.
According to Carstens, interpretable gender is an inherent, lexical feature of each noun
root, and number on nouns is an interpretable syntactic feature. On the other hand, gender and number agreement on elements such as determiners and adjectives are
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uninterpretable, syntactic features. The key difference between languages such as French
and languages such as Swahili is that in French the number marker does not agree for
gender, but in Swahili the number marker (the noun prefix) does agree for gender with
the head noun.
Figures 1 and 2 illustrate the structure of gender markers based on this model. I have
indicated uninterpretable gender agreement with the letter U.
2 Previous research on the L2 acquisition of Bantu languages
A few studies have examined the second language acquisition of noun prefixes and other
agreement markers (including those marked for number and gender) in Swahili and other
Bantu languages. In general, this research has shown that L2 learners rarely omit noun
prefixes, although they do use a default form or omit many other agreement markers,
such as those on adjectives, numerals, verbs, relative markers, and other elements
(Hobson, 1999; Mesthrie, 2007; Orr, 1987; Rubanza, 1991; for a review, see Spinner,
2011). However, most of these studies were exploratory in nature, involving a very small
dataset, and no study of which I am aware has specifically investigated the marking of
gender and number on noun prefixes in Bantu languages.
Figure 1. Gender and number on the French noun cases ‘houses’.
Figure 2. Gender and number on the Swahili noun watu ‘people’.
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IV Predictions for L2 Swahili based on current
hypotheses
The RDH and the FTFA hypothesis make different predictions for English-speaking
acquirers of Swahili. The RDH predicts that English-speaking learners will acquire number in the L2, at least on nouns. On the other hand, they should have difficulty with
gender marking, ultimately failing to acquire it in a native-like way. However, it is not
clear what prediction the RDH makes regarding the Swahili noun prefixes, which are
gender-specific markers of number. Since the noun prefixes conflate both gender and
number on a single marker, the RDH cannot make a clear prediction regarding the behavior of learners on these forms, nor of the ultimate acquirability of the forms.
The FTFA hypothesis predicts that these learners can eventually be successful in
marking both gender and number. Because English speakers are expected to transfer the
number feature from English, it would be expected that learners would have greater
initial success at marking number than gender (see, for example, White et al., 2004),
although over time accuracy on gender could become native-like. One possible prediction based on the MSIH is that early learners who are struggling with gender marking
will use a number marker with a default (underspecified) gender (see Prévost and White,
2000; Renaud, 2010); that is, they will mark singular and plural but fail to differentiate
nouns based on gender.
The Feature Reassembly approach is not yet developed enough to make specific predictions about acquisition of particular features. However, some general observations
can be made. First, since the realization of number marking is quite different than in the
L1 – that is, it is conflated with gender and in the form of a prefix rather than a suffix – it
is expected to be difficult to acquire despite the presence of Number in the L1. Both
detection and reassembly of the number feature would be affected. The Feature
Reassembly approach does not speak directly to the acquisition of gender with these
learners; however, Lardiere (2009, 214) posits that ‘any feature contrast that is detectable
is, in principle, ultimately acquirable’, which means that at some point learners should
presumably be able to acquire gender.
Based on these hypotheses, the research questions are as follows.
1. Are English-speaking learners of Swahili successful at marking number on nouns
in Swahili, at beginner and early-intermediate levels?
2. Are English-speaking learners of Swahili successful at marking gender on noun
prefixes in Swahili, at beginner and early-intermediate levels?
3. Are English-speaking learners of Swahili able to detect the noun prefixes as
markers of gender and number in the input, at these same levels?
Experiment 1 is an elicited production task, designed to investigate research Questions 1
and 2. Experiment 2 is a written gender-assignment task that deals with Question 3.
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V Experiment 1
1 Participants
A total of 38 students were recruited from two large Midwestern universities (Uni A and
Uni B) to participate in the study. Twenty-one of the students, ages 19–24 (M = 20.5, SD
= 1.5) were in their first year of study of Swahili, either at the middle or end of their second semester. Of these, 11 were students of Uni A (ages 19–24, M = 20.3, SD = 1.4) and
10 were from Uni B (ages 19–24, M = 20.7, SD = 1.6). Seventeen students, ages 20–30
(M = 23.1, SD = 3.3) were in their fourth semester or had just completed their fourth
semester of study. Of these, 7 were students of Uni A (ages 20–30, M = 24.1, SD = 3.7)
and 10 were from Uni B (ages 20–29, M = 22.4, SD = 3.1). The same instructor taught
both levels at each university, so that all the students from the first university had the same
instructor, and all the students from the second university had the same instructor.
Two of the students in the beginner group had studied abroad in a Swahili speaking
area for under two months; six of the students in the early-intermediate group had studied
abroad in a Swahili-speaking area for varying amounts of time; all were under four
months except for one student, who reported living for over two years in Tanzania, but
with a limited amount of exposure to the language.
All of the learners had previously studied a language with grammatical gender, including Arabic, French, German, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, or Spanish. I will return to this
point later.
2 Instruction at the two universities
Extensive observations of the courses at the two universities were made by the author.
The learners at the two universities used different instructional materials. The students at
Uni A used an in-house book compiled by the instructor. Students were presented with
genders 1/2, 3/4, 5/6, 7/8, and 9/10 by the end of the first semester. Genders were labeled
by number and by the prefixes typical of the singular and plural forms, e.g. Class 1/2 is
the ‘m/wa’ class because m- is the singular prefix and wa- is the plural prefix. Some generalizations regarding semantic cohesion of the nouns within each class are provided.
Instruction is communicative and involves a good deal of written and oral practice.
The students at Uni B used the textbook Swahili: A foundation for speaking, reading
and writing by Hinnebusch et al. (1998). This text presents the genders similarly to the
text at Uni A; that is, it labels the genders by the singular and plural prefixes as well as the
traditional labels, and gives a few semantic generalizations. In contrast to the materials at
Uni A, the structure of gender is not completely explained in the text until midway through
the first semester, after nouns from three genders have been presented in their singular and
plural forms. However, the instructor of the course presents this information explicitly
earlier. Overall, instruction at Uni B was somewhat more explicit and analytical, involving less communicative practice and focusing more on vocabulary and grammar.
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Figure 3. Sample item from experiment 1.
3 Procedure
The investigator collected data in individual sessions with the participants. After the
participants filled out a background questionnaire, the elicited production task began.
The participants were shown pairs of cards (one pair for each noun) with pictures that
differed in one quality – for example, color or size – and were asked to describe the difference. The cards elicited productions such as mw-alimu m-refu ‘this teacher is tall / this
is a tall teacher’ and mw-alimu m-fupi ‘this teacher is short / this is a short teacher’.
Figure 3 provides an example.
Some pairs also involved differences in actions; for instance, mwanamume anakula
‘the man is eating’ and mwanamume analala ‘the man is sleeping’. Participants were not
given feedback on their responses. If they were unable to respond to a particular card
pair, they were asked to say as much as they could and move on. The cards were presented in one of two pseudo-random orders. Responses were recorded and transcribed
for analysis by an advanced L2 speaker of Swahili. The investigator checked the transcriptions but found no points of disagreement.
When the learners finished the elicited production session, they took a paper-andpencil task (Experiment 2), described below. Experiment 1 generally took about 30 minutes; Experiment 2 took about 5 minutes, and the whole session took about 40 minutes.
4 Materials
The nouns and adjectives were selected from the classroom texts for the two universities.
The nouns were in the following categories:
a Nouns with adjectives
• Class 1/2 (m/wa): 6 singular, 6 plural; examples: mtoto ‘child’, mwanamke ‘woman’;
• Class 1/2 (other): 8 singular, 8 plural; examples: daktari ‘doctor’, simba ‘lion’;
• Class 3/4 (m/mi): 8 singular, 8 plural; examples: mti ‘tree’, mguu ‘foot’, mkono ‘hand’;
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• Class 5/6 (ji or ø/ma): 7 singular, 7 plural; examples: jicho ‘eye’, gari ‘car’, jino ‘tooth’;
• Class 7/8 (ki or ch/vi): 8 singular, 8 plural; examples: kitabu ‘book’, kitanda ‘bed’,
kiti ‘chair’.
b Nouns with verbs
• Class 1/2 (m/wa): 6 singular, 6 plural; examples: mwanafunzi ‘student’, mwalimu
‘teacher’;
• Class 1/2 (other): 8 singular, 8 plural; examples: ndege ‘bird’, hakimu ‘judge’.
Only cards with 1/2 nouns were designed to elicit verbal agreement, because class 1/2
nouns are animates. The class 1/2 ‘other’ category refers to nouns that take agreement for
class 1/2 but do not have the typical 1/2 singular and plural noun prefixes. For example,
daktari ‘doctor’ has a null prefix in the singular and ma- for the plural (madaktari ‘doctors’), like class 5/6 nouns, while ndege ‘bird’ has an n- prefix in both the singular and
plural (ndege ‘birds’), like class 9/10 nouns. It has already been found that these nouns are
highly problematic for learners, particularly when plural (Spinner and Thomas, 2008).
The adjectives used were: red, white, black, tall, short, big, little, fat, and skinny. The
verbs, which only appeared with animate (class 1/2) subjects, were: play, eat, sing, walk,
drink, sleep, cook, talk, read, write, teach, and have a question. All the adjectives and verbs
require agreement marking with the noun. Accuracy on adjective and verb agreement were
recorded. Results on noun prefixes from the adjective cards and the verb cards were
pooled, so that the final analysis on noun prefixes included 12 canonical class 1/2 nouns,
16 noncanonical class 1/2 nouns, and 6–8 in each of the other genders.1
The cards were pilot tested on two native speakers of Swahili, who produced the
expected nouns and adjectives except for one card, ‘cassava’, which was deemed to be
too difficult and was replaced.
5 Results
There were 7,752 responses (half singular and half plural) on this task. Because some of
the participants, particularly the ones in the beginner group, were not always successful
at producing the nouns depicted on the cards, many responses had to be discarded.
Learners responded with an appropriate noun 69% of the time, so that there were 5,356
noun tokens. In order to be retained for analysis, each learner was required to produce at
least four tokens in every gender (an arbitrary number). Two of the learners in the beginner group failed to meet this criterion and so were removed from the study, leaving 5,091
noun tokens from 36 learners available for analysis.
Learners’ responses were included in the analysis whenever possible. Nouns produced with incorrect adjectives or verbs (e.g. ‘black’ instead of ‘white’ or ‘eat’ instead of
‘drink’) were included in the result, as long as it did not affect the marking on the noun.
There were also some unexpected responses on the nouns, particularly on the cards
depicting humans (gender 1/2). For example, one of the cards was intended to elicit the
noun mwanafunzi ‘student’, but several participants produced mtoto ‘child’. Responses
with different nouns than the researcher intended to elicit were included in the result, as
long as it did not affect the marking of agreement. In 106 cases (2.1% of the final results),
learners produced a noun of a different gender than the intended noun, e.g. kitabu ‘book’
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Table 2. Results of Experiment 1.
Class 1/2 canonical
Class 3/4
Class 5/6
Class 7/8
Beginner (n = 19)
Early intermediate (n = 16)
Singular: M = 99.5, SD = 3.6;
Plural: M = 62.1 SD = 19.2;
F(1, 17) = 81.4, p < .001
Singular: M = 100, SD = 0;
Plural: M = 47.6, SD = 38.0;
F(1, 17) = 33.8, p < .001
Singular: M = 93.1, SD = 13.2;
Plural: M = 20.8, SD = 20.3;
F(1, 17) = 408.6, p < .001
Singular: M = 100, SD = 0;
Plural: M = 37.5, SD = 34.0;
F(1, 17) = 58.2, p < .001
Singular: M = 99.4, SD = 2.7;
Plural: M = 73.9 SD = 23.5;
F(1, 15) = 17.0, p = .001
Singular: M = 100, SD = 0;
Plural: M = 70.1, SD = 28.4;
F(1, 15) = 16.7, p = .001
Singular: M = 91.3, SD = 15.3;
Plural: M = 41.1, SD = 23.6,
F(1, 15) = 36.2, p < .001
Singular: M = 95.5, SD = 10.8;
Plural: M = 66.9, SD = 33.1;
F(1, 15) = 17.0, p = .001
(class 7/8) instead of daftari ‘notebook’ (class 5/6). As long as they were reasonable
approximations of the intended noun (which they generally were), these responses were
included in the result in the appropriate gender category.
a Accuracy on noun prefixes. Because not all the learners were able to produce all the
appropriate nouns, it was decided to use percentages of accurate responses in statistical
analyses. Recall that learners had to produce a minimum of four tokens per gender to be
included in the analyses. Additionally, performance on the noncanonical class 1/2 plural
nouns, which take class 1/2 agreement on adjectives but the noun prefix of other classes,
was so poor that it was decided to analyse and discuss them separately.
A repeated-measures ANOVA with level (beginner vs. early-intermediate) and university (instructor) as between-participants factors and accuracy (percentage correct) on
singular and plural nouns as a within-participants factor was conducted. Accuracy was
a significant factor F(1, 32) = 143.67, p < .001, with accuracy on plural nouns significantly lower than accuracy on singular nouns. The students’ university was a nonsignificant factor F(1, 34) = 1.96, p = .17, and there was no significant interaction between
university and accuracy F(1, 32) = 1.01, p = .322; therefore, in further analyses, students from the two universities were analysed together. The students’ level was a significant factor F(1, 34) = 10.13, p = .003 and there was an interaction between level and
accuracy F(1, 32) = 7.94, p = .008. For this reason, in further analyses, the two groups
of learners were analysed separately.
To determine whether accuracy on plural was lower than singular for all of the noun
classes included in the study, and for both beginner and early-intermediate learners, the
repeated-measures ANOVA was conducted for each noun class, for beginners and earlyintermediate learners. Accuracy on plural was significantly lower than accuracy on singular in each case. Results are shown in Table 2 and are displayed in figure form in
Figures 4 and 5.
Interestingly, an analysis of errors on plural nouns shows that they were not gender
errors; rather, number errors were the most frequent. Specifically, learners frequently
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Figure 4. Accuracy on noun prefixes on the four elicited genders: Beginner group.
Figure 5.. Accuracy on noun prefixes on the four elicited genders: Early intermediate group..
Table 3.. Error type in Experiment 1..
Number errors
Gender errors
Beginner
Early intermediate
386
6
291
4
used singular noun markers (of the appropriate gender) where plural markers are required.
Table 3 shows the number of error types on plural nouns across groups. On singular
nouns, there were a few errors in the other direction; that is, a few learners used plural
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Second Language Research 29(4)
prefixes on singular nouns; however, they were always of the correct gender. This type
of error was rare, however.
In no case was a noun prefix omitted and the bare root used, except where singular 5/6
forms (with a null prefix) were used instead of plural forms (ma-). For example, gari
‘car’ is a 5/6 noun; the plural form should be ma-gari, but many learners produced gari
for both the singular and plural form. This error was not considered to be a true noun
prefix omission, since learners are following the same pattern as they did with the other
three genders: that is, they use the singular form where the plural form is required.
b Class 1/2 noncanonical nouns. The overall pattern of results for class 1/2 noncanonical
nouns is the same as for the other genders; that is, accuracy on singular is high (100%,
576/576) but accuracy on plural is lower (85%, 480/562). This finding was true for both
beginner and early-intermediate groups; for the sake of space, the results are presented
for both groups combined. However, a closer look for both groups reveals that performance is split between two types of noncanonical nouns: those that require a prefix for
plurals and those that do not. Learners are highly successful on the plural class 1/2 nouns
that behave like class 9/10 nouns with respect to prefixes; that is, they take a null or nprefix in both the singular and the plural. Considering that learners simply use the same
form in singular and plural, it is not surprising that they do well on these (accuracy on
plural: 95%). On the other hand, learners performed much more poorly on nouns that
took no prefix in the singular but a prefix in the plural (e.g. daktari ‘doctor’ singular,
madaktari ‘doctors’ plural). In fact, although accuracy for these nouns on singular was
perfect at 100%, accuracy on plural was only 13%.
c Participant and item analyses. In order to ascertain to what extent individual learners
display the patterns evident in the group results, a participant analysis was conducted.
Importantly, there was not a single learner who did not make at least a few errors substituting singular for plural forms: the most successful learner made six errors of this nature.
However, some learners made the error more frequently than others. Learners were thus
divided into two groups: those who regularly used singular forms in place of plural
forms, and those who demonstrated this pattern less consistently. Those who made the
error regularly were defined as those who used at least 15% singular forms on plural
nouns (an arbitrary cutoff). Those who made the error inconsistently were defined as
those who used fewer than 15% singular forms on plural nouns. Most learners fell into
the ‘over 15%’ category, even in the more advanced group, indicating that the pattern
holds for the majority of participants. Only three of the beginners and five of the
early intermediates fell into the ‘under 15%’ category; the rest made the error more
frequently.
An item analysis was also conducted to determine whether it is the same set of items
that cause difficulty for all learners, which may suggest a lexical issue rather than a morphosyntactic one. The nouns were divided into three groups: those on which errors were
made the most frequently (the most problematic items), those on which errors were made
the most infrequently (the least problematic items), and the rest. Nouns with the most
frequent errors were defined as those with under 15% accuracy (an arbitrary cutoff).
Nouns with the least frequent errors were defined as those with over 85% accuracy. All
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others fell into the middle category. The results of this analysis demonstrated that all
items in classes 1/2 (canonical), 3/4, or 7/8 fell into the middle category; no items were
particularly problematic or particularly problem-free for learners. That is, it is not the
case that certain of these nouns drove the results found in the statistical analyses.
On the other hand, a few groups of nouns did have very high or low accuracy. Learners
were highly accurate on class 1/2 noncanonical plural nouns with no prefix (although this
is trivially true, since the form is the same in singular and plural). Learners were highly
inaccurate on class 1/2 noncanonical nouns requiring an additional prefix in the plural,
such as daktari ‘doctor’ (singular: daktari; plural: madaktari); this group was marked
with only 14% accuracy in the plural. Similarly, class 5/6 nouns, which have no prefix
for singular forms but a ma- prefix for plural forms, were also highly subject to error; for
instance, gari ‘car’ (singular: gari, plural: magari) was only marked with 6% accuracy.
These trends indicate that the participants had difficulty with certain plural prefixes more
than others.
6 Discussion of Experiment 1
a Predictions of the various hypotheses. The RDH did not make any clear predictions for
noun prefixes, on which a feature present in the L1 (number) and a feature not present in
the L1 (gender) are fused on a single morpheme. FTFA predicts the potential for success
for advanced learners, but does not make specific predictions for these beginner and
early-intermediate level learners on these forms. Note, however, that the early-intermediate learners are significantly more accurate than the beginning learners, suggesting that
acquisition of gender and number marking may eventually be possible.
One possible prediction, based on previous work on the MSIH and FTFA, is that
learners would use a number marker with an underspecified default gender. However,
this prediction turned out not to be correct. Rather, the results of the Experiment 1 demonstrated that gender marking was consistently correct on all nouns, but number marking
was faulty: the precise opposite of the prediction. This result is not expected based on
transfer of features from the L1, since English has number marking but not gender marking. Note, however, that it is unclear whether these learners have actually acquired gender, or if something else is going on. Thus neither the RDH nor the FTFA or MSIH can
speak directly to these data.
Instead, English-speaking learners of Swahili often used the singular form in both
singular and plural contexts. For example, many learners labeled a picture of one book
kitabu ‘book’, and also labeled a picture of several books kitabu ‘book’ (correct form:
vitabu). In other words, they had an invariant form of the noun. They did not omit prefixes to produce, for instance, -tabu (the root of ‘book’). These results corroborate the
notes of previous researchers, who have commented on the same patterns in L2 learners
of Swahili and other Bantu languages (Hobson, 1999; Mesthrie, 2007; Orr, 1987).
Singular marking has also been argued to be the default in a feature geometric analysis
by Harley and Ritter (2002), which could at least partially explain the use of singular
rather than plural noun prefixes.
There are interesting comparisons to child L1 acquisition of similar languages.
Omitting noun prefixes and producing the root by itself (e.g. falme for m-falme ‘king’) is
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Second Language Research 29(4)
very common for L1 learners of Bantu languages (Demuth, 2003). These productions
from child learners indicate that children separate the gender/number marker from the
root. As Demuth (2003: 211) puts it: ‘Acquisition studies of Bantu nominal morphology
report very similar findings: First, it appears that both singular and plural noun class
prefixes are segmented as separate morphemes early on.’ The fact that these L2 learners
do not ever omit noun prefixes may indicate that they are not segmenting the morphemes
in the same way that children do.2
Another difference between child acquisition of noun classes and these L2 learners
involves the acquisition of plurals. Demuth (2003: 211) reports that for L1 acquirers of
Bantu languages, there is no delay in the acquisition of plural noun classes, despite the
fact that singulars appear more frequently than plurals in discourse. On the other hand,
with the L2 learners in this study, the acquisition of plurals is somewhat delayed.3
As proponents of the MSIH point out, however, missing inflection does not necessarily indicate the absence of that feature in the interlanguage. Learners could be using an
underspecified default form for number if they are unable to locate an appropriate lexical
item to match the syntactic features in their interlanguage representation. This view is
also supported by the morphological underspecification hypothesis based on feature
geometry (McCarthy, 2007). The default marker could be class 9/10 agreement, which
has the same prefix for singular and plural. One argument against this analysis, however,
is that these learners are presented with genders 1/2, 3/4, 5/6, and 7/8 before 9/10. It is
unlikely that learners only begin to use the 9/10 default after they have been producing
plurals with a different marker for four other genders.
Similarly, the fact that learners mark gender accurately does not necessarily indicate
that they have acquired gender for all of these nouns. In fact, I argue that these learners
may not consistently have gender in their L2 lexical or syntactic representations, at least
at early stages of acquisition. Rather, I argue that learners have difficulties detecting the
number and gender feature in the Swahili input. Specifically, learners fail to parse the
noun prefix as a separate morpheme marking gender and number, but rather take it to be
part of the root itself. If this is the case, then there is little chance of making a gender
error on the noun prefix, since learners would be unlikely to split the root morpheme.
Figure 6 shows an analysis of the hypothesized learner structure in the interlanguage.
Number is empty (in that an overt form for it has not yet been detected) or has a phonologically null marker. Gender may or may not be present in the interlanguage.
Interestingly, it appears that learners may have difficulty segmenting adjectives, as
well. Although a full analysis is not presented here, an examination of learners’ use of
Figure 6.. Hypothesized representation of a Swahili noun in early learners’ interlanguage..
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adjectives demonstrates that they nearly always have an invariant form that is not overtly
marked for agreement with the associated noun. The default form is often either bare,
with no marking at all, or the class 9/10 form (which can be used as a default adjective
form in Swahili). Thus the learners’ use of marking on adjectives is not informative
regarding their representation of gender and number on the associated noun.4
A reasonable question to ask at this point is: why do learners fail to parse the noun
prefix as a gender and number marker? Previous research has indicated that Englishspeaking learners of European languages have little trouble producing number markers
early on, and successfully (e.g. White et al., 2004). There are at least two possibilities
suggested by the Feature Reassembly approach to explain why these learners are not as
successful. First, the problem could lie in the location of the number marker in the L1 and
the TL. In English, the number marker (and, indeed, all inflectional morphemes and
many derivational ones) appear as suffixes. In Swahili, the number marker is a prefix. It
is possible that English speakers are ‘looking for’ number marking as a suffix. If no overt
marker is detected, learners might analyse the marker as a null form; that is, without
phonological content. Thus the number feature will not be overtly realized despite its
presence in the L1 and possibly also in the representation.
If suffixes are easier to detect, we would expect learners to be more successful with
Italian plural markers, which are conflated with gender as in Swahili, but appear as
suffixes, as shown below.
4. Feminine nouns
(a) la pizza cald-a
the pizza.fem.sg hot-fem.sg
‘the hot pizza’
(b) le pizze the pizzas.fem.pl hot-fem.pl
‘the hot pizzas’
cald-e
5. Masculine nouns
(a) il cane grande
the dog.masc.sg large-masc.sg
‘the large dog’
(b) i cani grandi
the dogs.masc.pl large-masc.pl
‘the large dogs’
Perhaps because the Italian number marking is a suffix on the noun, English speakers
would detect it more quickly. Of course, the fact that Italian has a simpler two-gender
system may also facilitate acquisition relative to the acquisition of Swahili.
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Second Language Research 29(4)
A second (not incompatible) possibility suggested by the Feature Reassembly
approach is that the conflation of the gender and number feature on a single morpheme
makes it difficult to detect either one. As Montrul (2009: 301) comments, ‘breaking up
bundles’ of features on a single morphological form may be particularly difficult for
learners. Some previous research has provided evidence for this argument; for instance,
Spinner and Juffs (2008) found that two learners of German had little success with the
gender system. Many of the learners’ problems seemed to stem from the fact that in
German case marking, gender, number and definiteness are all expressed on a single
form (the determiner).
The Feature Reassembly Approach (FRA) thus seems to be more suited to describing
these data than does either the FTFA or the RDH. The RDH does not make predictions
regarding particular configurations of morphemes in the TLs and therefore cannot speak
to the results regarding gender and number in this case. The FTFA predicts transfer of the
number feature, but does not predict the difficulty that learners have in expressing an
overt number feature in this case. It also does not speak to errors that learners make in the
acquisition of new features or different expressions of features. On the other hand, the
FRA provides a framework from which to discuss the patterns of errors in these learners’
acquisition of Swahili.
b Performance on different genders. The pattern of using singular forms in plural contexts
holds for all four genders; however, there were more errors in certain categories than others. Class 1/2 had the fewest errors in plural marking, as well as the most errors in singular
marking (where a plural form was used). Class 5/6 had the most errors in plural marking;
even 4th semester learners were under 50% accuracy on these plural forms.
We begin our discussion with class 5/6. Recall that singular class 5/6 nouns often have
a null prefix, e.g. shati ‘shirt’, daftari ‘notebook’. The plural prefix is ma- (e.g. mashati
‘shirts’, madaftari ‘notebooks’). As mentioned earlier, another gender, 9/10, also has a
null prefix on singular nouns but, crucially, there is null marker on plurals as well (e.g.
filimbi ‘flute’, filimbi ‘flutes’). It is possible that learners are overgeneralizing the 9/10
null plural marker to the 5/6 nouns. Another possibility is simply that the learners may
believe that some of the 5/6 nouns are 9/10 nouns and respond accordingly.
As for the class 1/2 nouns, it is possible that the reason that learners have the highest
accuracy on plurals is very simple: learners have the most practice with these. Class 1/2
nouns are generally taught first (as they were with this group) and are likely to be among
the most commonly used in class, because they include nearly all animates, including
people (e.g. man, woman), family relationships (e.g. sister, grandfather), and professions
(e.g. doctor, farmer). The fact that learners are most accurate with this group may be
further evidence that over time and with practice parsing of the noun prefix as a separate
morpheme can take place, perhaps beginning with the most familiar forms. The fact that
learners made some errors in using plural forms instead of singular forms with this class
(e.g. watoto ‘children’ instead of mtoto ‘child’) can be viewed as evidence of segmentation. Once learners determine that a prefix can be separated from the root, we would
expect to see errors in ‘putting them back together’. These errors could potentially be
analysed as a sort of mapping problem as predicted by the MSIH, in that under pressure
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learners may have trouble selecting the appropriate noun prefix. Note, though, that at this
point the errors are only in number marking, not gender marking.
On the other hand, there are more errors in gender marking on class 1/2 ‘noncanonical’ nouns; that is, those nouns that take 1/2 agreement marking on adjectives, verbs and
other elements but singular and plural noun prefixes from other classes (e.g. ma-daktari
wa-refu ‘tall doctors’). It is likely that these nouns show more errors in gender for plurals
because they do not follow the same pattern as the other class 1/2 nouns and thus there is
an even greater challenge in detecting the number and gender features in the input.
However, the overall pattern of errors is the same as for the other categories; that is,
singular forms are used in place of plurals, and errors usually lie with plural marking.
In summary, our answers to the first two research questions are as follows:
1. Are English-speaking learners of Swahili successful at marking number on nouns
in Swahili, at early levels? These English-speaking learners of Swahili were not
successful at marking number overtly on nouns, despite the presence of the number feature in English and possibly in the interlanguage representation. I argue
that the lack of success is due to difficulty in detecting and reassembling formal
features.
2. Are English-speaking learners of Swahili successful at marking gender agreement on noun prefixes in Swahili, at early levels? These English speakers were
very successful at marking gender agreement on nouns in Swahili, but this may
not reflect success at gender assignment and gender agreement. In fact, it may be
due to a failure to parse the noun prefix as a gender and number marker.
VI Experiment 2
Experiment 2 was designed to investigate the problem of feature detection in more detail.
The Feature Reassembly approach proposes two potential areas of difficulty for second
language learners: the detection of features in the input and the reassembly of the features in the interlanguage to match the configuration in the TL. I have suggested that
learners have difficulty detecting the presence of the Swahili noun prefix as a marker of
gender and number.
In Experiment 2, learners assign gender and number to nonce nouns with singular and
plural noun prefixes for different genders. A translation, either singular or plural, is also
provided. The task is designed to examine whether learners can use the noun prefixes to
determine gender and number in Swahili. If learners fail to assign gender and/or number
on the basis of noun prefixes, then it is evidence of a detection problem. Experiment 2
was carried out immediately after Experiment 1 with the same participants.
1 Materials and procedure
One hundred nonce Swahili nouns were created by changing initial and final letters or
syllables of existing Swahili nouns, loosely following Stark and McClelland (2000). The
nonce nouns followed the spelling and pronunciation rules of Swahili and were checked
against a dictionary to make sure they were not real Swahili nouns. Each noun appeared
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Second Language Research 29(4)
with a brief definition, generally obscure animals, objects, people and trees for which the
learners were very unlikely to know a real Swahili word, e.g. ‘horse chestnut tree’,
‘duchess’, and ‘Siberian tiger’. The directions stated: ‘Decide which noun class each of
the following imaginary Swahili words belongs in. Write the number in the blank.’ An
example of each noun prefix was provided, using traditional pedagogical terminology
for noun class (with which the learners were familiar); that is, odd numbers for singular
and even for plural. Participants completed this task immediately after the elicitation
task, generally in about 5 minutes. Five native speakers also completed the task.
Of the 100 nouns, 40 nouns in class 1/2 (canonical) and 3/4 related to this study; the
other 60 were nouns of various classes with definitions that were semantically typical or
atypical for the gender; these were included for another research interest and the results
are not reported here, but they served as fillers in this task. Of these 40 nouns, 20 were
congruent for number in terms of the number marking and translation, and 20 were
incongruent. Half were singular and half were plural. For example, in the class 1/2 group,
a congruent singular noun is mname ‘counselor’, since m- is the singular prefix for class
1/2, and a congruent plural noun is wafiti ‘duchesses’, since wa- is the plural prefix.
There were also five incongruent nouns with a singular prefix but plural translation
(e.g. mkona ‘important people’) and five incongruent nouns with a plural prefix but a
singular translation (e.g. warembi ‘chauffer’). There were also 20 nouns in the same
categories for class 3/4 nouns.
2 Results
The congruent nouns were designed to have cues to gender and number that follow the
typical patterns in Swahili. On these nouns, the native speakers were accurate (in the
sense of choosing the gender indicated by the gender and number cues in Swahili) 98%
of the time (98/100). Similarly, both the beginner and early-intermediate learners were
generally accurate, both for singulars and plurals. The beginner group was 86% (163/190)
accurate on singular and 82% (156/190) accurate on plural; the early-intermediate group
was 88% (150/170) accurate on singular and 85% (145/170) accurate on plural. For neither group was there a significant difference between singular and plural accuracy based
on a paired sample t-test; for the beginner group: t(18) = .75, p = .47, and for the earlyintermediate group: t(16) = .81, p = .43. These results show that learners can use the noun
prefix and the translation to determine a noun’s gender and number.
The results on the incongruent nouns reveal which cue they relied on. On nouns that
are incongruent for number marking on the noun prefix and in the translation, both the
native speakers and the two learner groups primarily used the noun prefix to assign
gender and number. The beginner group used the noun prefix 62% of the time (236/380),
and the number in translation (whether the noun was singular or plural in the translation) 26% of the time (99/380). The rest of the responses (labeled ‘other’) related to
neither the translation nor the prefix. A repeated measures ANOVA demonstrated a significant difference between the three types of responses: F(1,18) = 37.4, p < .001. Post
hoc tests using the Bonferroni correction revealed a significant difference between the
use of the noun prefix and number in translation (p = .038), and noun prefix and ‘other’
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(p < .001), but no significant difference between the use of translation and the use of
‘other’ (p = .105).
A similar result is found for the early-intermediate group. The early-intermediate
group used the noun prefix 68% of the time (232/340) and the number in translation 12%
of the time (42/340). A repeated measures ANOVA demonstrated a significant difference
between the three types of responses: F(1, 16) = 34.3, p < .001. Post hoc tests using the
Bonferroni correction revealed a significant difference between the use of the noun prefix and translation (p < .001) and noun prefix and ‘other’ (p < .001), but no significant
difference between the use of translation and the use of ‘other’ (p = .529). These results
are similar to the native speaker controls, who used the prefix 62% of the time (62/100)
and the definition 19% of the time (19/100).
It should be noted that learners used the noun prefix to determine gender and number
for nouns with both singular and plural prefixes (beginner: singular prefixes 55%
(105/190), plural prefixes 68% (129/190); early-intermediate: singular prefixes, 64%
(109/170); plural prefixes 73% (124/170)). ‘Other’ responses generally consisted of a
default gender (class 9/10 and to a lesser extent 5/6), although there were also some
seemingly random choices.
3 Discussion of Experiment 2
The results of Experiment 2 demonstrate that L2 learners are able to recognize the noun
prefix as an indicator of gender and number. They are successful at choosing the correct
number and gender categories for nouns with various noun prefixes and, even when
gender cues conflict, they still rely on the noun prefix for information about gender and
number. Since we have seen that learners fail to use plural markers in their production,
we are left with the question: since they seem to recognize them, why do learners not
use noun prefixes to indicate number? To add another perplexing twist: the learners
have received a good deal of instruction on noun prefixes, gender and number, but do
not seem to realize them consistently in speech. In fact, a few participants made comments during or after data collection indicating that they had trouble marking plurals,
even though they ‘knew it’.
To understand this, we may need to deconstruct the idea of ‘detection’ in the Feature
Reassembly approach. At first, it might seem that the learners do not have a detection
problem, as long as we define detection as ‘perception’. That is, the learners respond to
the difference between, e.g. mtu (‘person’) and watu (‘people’), and recognize the initial
sounds as markers of gender or plurality. Indeed, this perception of forms is likely to be
the first stage of detection. However, we have seen evidence that the noun prefixes are
not consistently segmented as morphemes associated with number and gender in the
interlanguage grammar. One explanation is that learners are assigning noun prefixes on
the basis of phonology without segmenting the markers and linking them to the number
and gender feature. In other words, the learners may treat noun prefixes much like word
class markers in Spanish: as forms that indicate gender, but are generally inseparable
from the root. Examples of Spanish nouns are given in (6). The -a endings often indicate
feminine gender, while -o endings often indicate masculine gender. Note that the word
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Second Language Research 29(4)
markers in Spanish do not carry gender agreement as they do in Swahili, nor do they
mark number.
6. (a) casa ‘house’, manzana ‘apple’, hermana ‘sister’, (b) libro ‘book’, gato ‘cat’, hermano ‘brother’, fem
masc
Previous research has demonstrated that learners are sensitive to this pattern (e.g.
Finnemann, 1992; Franceschina, 2005), so it is reasonable to think that these learners of
Swahili could behave similarly by responding to word beginnings as cues to labeling a
word with a particular noun class; but they do not segment the word beginning as the
marker of gender and number itself.
If this analysis is correct, it is appropriate to claim that these learners have a detection
problem, even though they respond to the prefixes as markers of noun class in the written
task. Specifically, they are unable to segment the Swahili noun prefixes into separate
morphemes that indicate number and gender, at least at early stages. The fact that two
features are fused on the same form may make this particularly difficult. This detection
failure makes it impossible to produce overt number marking appropriately.
One other consideration regarding this part is that it is highly metalinguistic and could
reflect explicit knowledge of grammar. If there is a dissociation between explicit knowledge of grammar and linguistic competence, it is possible that the observed behavior
does not truly reflect ‘detection’ of features but rather knowledge learned in classes.
While this is a possibility, I argue that the task is a reasonable measure of detection in the
sense that Lardiere (2009: 214) describes it: ‘the basis for detectability is the observation
of any formal contrast, such as the difference between student / students.’ Perhaps future
research could address this issue of detection by other means, such as comprehension
measures, picture matching, and so forth.
A final important factor that must be taken into account is that this behavior could to
some extent be a third language (L3) effect. All of the learners included in the analysis
(35/36) had previously studied a European language with gender, often Spanish.5 Since
Spanish has the abovementioned word markers, and since number and gender are
expressed as separate exponents in the European languages the learners had studied,
learners may expect Swahili to function similarly. It is possible that this previous exposure to gender could facilitate or hinder the acquisition of gender in Swahili in other
ways, as well. Future research could address this issue.
VII Summary and conclusions
The purpose of this study was to examine to what extent the Feature Reassembly
approach could contribute to an understanding of English speakers’ acquisition of
Swahili gender and number. The RDH and the FTFA were not useful in describing the
unusual finding that this group of L2 learners failed to consistently mark a TL feature
that is present in the L1 (number) and yet made virtually no errors in marking a TL feature that is not present in the L1 (gender). I argue that the learners’ errors stem from a
failure to parse Swahili nouns as segmentable into two morphemes: a gender-specific
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marker of number and a root. This difficulty can best be described as a detection error, as
described by the Feature Reassembly approach.
Further research on the acquisition of Swahili could provide more evidence for the
arguments presented here. For example, based on these arguments, it could be predicted
that L2 learners of Swahili will make a large number of errors with derivational processes that require a prefix to be separated from the root, because they will have trouble
identifying the root. For instance, the diminutive is formed with the prefix ki- added to
the noun root; e.g. mlima ‘mountain’ (class 3/4) vs. kilima ‘hill’ (noun root: -lima).
I predict that this pattern will hold for learners of other languages. That is, in cases where
a learner must acquire a feature that is fused with a feature not present in the L1, there will
be a delay in detecting the feature in the input and in producing the appropriate forms.
It is not possible to draw conclusions about ultimate attainment with these data, but
future research could address this issue by examining more advanced learners.
Additionally, future research (for instance, with learners of Italian) could address the
question of whether the location of the morpheme (as a prefix) causes particular difficulty in terms of feature detection.
Finally, it is important to note that in principle FTFA, or even the RDH, is not incompatible with a Feature Reassembly approach; rather, the FTFA and RDH do not directly
address issues such as those described in this study. A useful goal would be to combine a
hypothesis such as FTFA with a Feature Reassembly approach to create a fuller account
of the L2 acquisition of morphosyntax. One way to begin this process is to investigate
different expressions of formal features in the TL and the L1, as outlined in this article.
I look forward to exploring this new direction in L2 research.
Acknowledgements
Parts of this article werepresented at BUCLD 2008 and 2009. I would like to thank Rebecca Foote,
Deo Ngonyani, Bill van Patten, Jamie Thomas and the anonymous SLR reviewers for helpful comments on this article. All errors of course remain my own.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.
Notes
1.
The number of items is not the same across each condition because of the challenge of finding
words of the desired classes with which early learners would be familiar.
2. An anonymous reviewer points out that Demuth provides a mainly prosodic account for children’s omission of prefixes. If children’s difficulties with producing the initial prefix are due
solely to prosodic difficulties, then the comparison between children and mature adults here
may not be useful. However, it is not clear whether prosodic constraints are the only factor in
children’s omission of noun prefixes.
3. It is of course possible that frequency has more of an effect for L2 learners than L1 learners,
but I argue that frequency alone cannot account for the extreme asymmetries found here.
4. Because learners only produced verbs with class 1/2 nouns, an analysis of their performance
on verbal marking is not informative here. However, an examination of the data demonstrates
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Second Language Research 29(4)
that the learners were quite good at using the appropriate gender for verbs. On the other hand,
there were errors in number marking. This issue clearly warrants further research.
5. Many of the learners had previous exposure to more than one second language, but all had
studied a European language for at least one semester.
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