STUDY OF THE BOTTLENECK HYPOTHESIS IN L2 ACQUISITION: The acquisition of functional morphology and syntax by Persian L2 learners of English

Abstract

The current study tried to test the Slabakova’s Bottleneck Hypothesis which claims that “functional morphology is the bottleneck of the SLA” (Slabakova, 2006, 2008, 2013). A total of 44 participants in 3 groups answered three kinds of questions including Proficiency Test, GJT, and Background questionnaire. Subject-verb agreement and past tense -ed were selected to test functional morphology while two declarative sentences including subject initial and non-subject initial sentences were chosen to test the word order. The correlation of language proficiency, age, length of exposure with the Judgment Test also involved in the analysis. The results fully support the Bottleneck Hypothesis even though one of the morphological conditions had a high mean score in the Judgment Test. Subject-verb agreement (third-person singular -s) has been the most difficult conditions. Past tense -ed, non-subject initial sentences, and subject initial sentences were in the hierarchy of the difficulty respectively.