The Acquisition of Functional Morphology, Semantics-Morphology and Syntax by Persian Learners of English The Bottleneck Hypothesis in L2 Acquisition

Abstract

In the current thesis, I investigated the Bottleneck Hypothesis (Slabakova, 2006, 2008, 2013) concerning Persian L1 speakers' acquisition of English as their second language. The Bottleneck Hypothesis (BH) focuses on the aspects of learning a second language that are challenging and those that are simple. According to this hypothesis, acquiring functional morphology is the challenging part (or the bottleneck) of second language acquisition while acquiring syntax and semantics is more straightforward. In this thesis, I examined three linguistic conditions (Subject-Verb agreement, Verb-Object word order and Definiteness) as representative of three linguistic categories (Morphology, Syntax, Semantics-Morphology). 29 university students whose first language is Persian participated in the study through the administration of an acceptability judgment task with 48 questions, a background questionnaire, and a competency exam (Oxford proficiency test) with 20 multiple-choice test items to answer. The results indicated that the Bottleneck Hypothesis is supported. The participants struggled more with recognizing morphology than narrow syntax. Definiteness as a representative of semantics-morphology was the most challenging condition for participants. Subject-Verb agreement and Verb-Object word order were in the hierarchy of the difficulty respectively.