L1 Influence on English Passive Constructions: A Comparative Analysis Across Akan-English Bilinguals, Native Norwegians and Norwegian-English Bilinguals.

Abstract

Generally across linguistic research, the processing of passives is considered more difficult to process than the actives in both native speakers and second language learners due to its complex syntactic structure. This study presents findings which explore the linguistic influence of first languages (L1) in this case; Akan and Norwegian, on the processing of second language (L2) English passive structures as well as on the active and the impersonal structures. This investigation considers how linguistic influence, especially from different language families (Akan from Niger-Congo and Norwegian from Indo-European) which have distinct syntactic structures could potentially bring a unique finding on cross-linguistic influence on passive sentence processing while also comparing two languages that share similar syntactic structure, ie. Norwegian and English which are both Indo-European languages.

This study seeks to examine how the passive, active, and impersonal sentences are processed among three different groups: Ghanaians (Akan-English bilinguals), Norwegian-English bilinguals and Native Norwegian speakers of English. It aims to determine whether the passive sentences take longer to process compared to the active and the impersonal ones, and whether there are significant differences in processing these three sentence types across the different groups. This research utilised psycholinguistic task which was conducted through Psychopy. This involved presenting the participants with three different sentence types: the actives, the passives and the impersonals, which were displayed in a randomised order, and participants were asked to identify which noun phrase in the sentences was the ‘doer’-agent or the ‘acted on’- recipient/receiver of the action after reading a sentence. While the experiment was not timed, participants completed two tasks within this experiment: a self-paced reading task of sentences and an identification task where reaction time (RT) was measured for sentence reading time and for noun phrase reading time and decision accuracy for the identification task. Overall, the passives were challenging across the three groups and difficult to process than the active and impersonal sentences which were processed more accurately by all groups. The results suggest that language proficiency, linguistic similarity, and processing complexity are likely interacting to produce the observed differences between the groups while also taking into consideration exposure, education and proficiency which play critical roles in the second language processing and comprehension.