INTERFERENCE AND OVERGENERALIZATION IN SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING: THE ACQUISITION OF ENGLISH DATIVE VERBS BY NATIVE SPEAKERS OF FRENCH

Abstract

This paper examines the role of interference in the acquisition of English dative verbs by native speakers of French. Two case studies involving the acquisition of English in a natural environment are presented as well as the results of two judgment tests in which each of four subjects was asked to judge the grammaticality of sentences containing both correctly and incorrectly used dative verb structures. Analysis suggests that the process of lexical acquisition of verbs in English is similar for both first and second language learners. However, second language learners may produce overgeneralization errors unlike those of first language learners due to incorrect assumptions concerning marked and unmarked forms in English for which there is positive evidence in both the source and target languages. Thus, although interference plays a significant role in the process of lexical acquisition of verbs, this does not rule out the hypothesis that first and second language acquisition are essentially like processes. If a more sophisticated understanding of the process of interference can be gained, it should be possible to predict the characteristic errors a second language learner will make based upon the particulars of the learner's native language.

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