Learning Japanese as a Second Language: A Processability Perspect ...

PT is a nonlanguage-specific, universal theory of SLA. It originally used German L2 to test the theory-driven acquisitional stages. So far, PT has been applied to, and its typological validity tested against, various languages, including Swedish (Pienemann & Håkansson, 1999), Arabic (Mansouri, 1997, 2002), and Chinese (Zhang, 2001, 2002). However, the acquisitional stages for Japanese L2 morphology/syntax were only briefly touched upon (Pienemann, 1998b; partially in Di Biase & Kawaguchi, 2002), and as of yet, no substantial study has been done. This is the first in-depth empirical study of PT application to Japanese L2.

In PT, Japanese has an important role to play in testing and further developing the theory because of its typological characteristics. Japanese is a typologically ‘head-last’ language and belongs typologically with SOV (Subject, Object, Verb) languages. Among the languages to which PT has been applied, Japanese is the only language that exhibits the ‘head-last’ feature as well as SOV word order.¹ Languages such as Japanese offer a significant testing ground for the theory.

Furthermore, once the universal hierarchy of developmental stages is identified in Japanese L2, a PT-derived hypothesis on cross-linguistic influence on learning Japanese L2 can also be tested. Thus, this study addresses the issue of L1 transfer in the early stages by learners with English, Portuguese, and French L1, all of which are typologically distant from Japanese. There are a number of competing approaches to L1 transfer, but this study constructs predictions based on two of them: the PT-based ‘developmentally moderated transfer hypothesis’ (DMTH henceforth; Pienemann, 1998b; Håkansson, Pienemann, & Sayehli, 2002) and the ‘full transfer/full access’ (FT/FA) model (Schwartz & Sprouse, 1994, 1996). More specifically, this study examines the acquisition of Japanese L2 features and structures at early stages by learners with typologically distant L1s.

Establishing a unified account of developmental sequences is important not only in the field of general SLA, but also in the field of acquisition of Japanese L2. In the last decade, many studies of Japanese L2 have focused on the issue of developmental sequences (for reviews of Japanese L2, see Yoshioka, 1999, Nagatomo, 2002). However, the nature