Input Processing of Turkish Learners of English from Beginner and Advanced Level of Proficiency

Abstract

English L1 acquirers learning Romance Languages have been claimed to process the first noun or pronoun of a sentence as the agent. However, because most of the evidence is based on learners with English as an L1, it is not clearly known whether this is due to a universal strategy or is a result of L1 transfer. According to one model of input processing (VanPatten, 2007), L2 learners would initially assign agent position to the first noun and object position to the second noun (First Noun Principle) or it might be that the L1 parser is transferred into the L2 input processing procedures (L1 Transfer Principle). The present study aims to address whether the L1 parsing procedures are transferred or whether there is a universal First Noun Principle. L1 Turkish speakers learning English as an L2 enrolled in beginning (n=48) and advanced (n=48) English classes were asked to interpret English sentences which included contextual cues or neutral contexts preceding the target clause. All participants completed two tasks: an impromptu discussion and a data-elicitation task. In order to analyze the data, the frequency of the items was calculated and chi-square test was applied for each independent variable. The results indicated that learners from beginner proficiency level interpreted subjects differently in different input conditions whereas the subject identification was not different for learners from advanced level of proficiency.