Cues to Word Class Assignment
The categorisation of words into classes, such as noun, verb, and adjective is a complex process that involves parsing the input for morphological, syntactic, and semantic cues.2 Morphological cues encompass both derivations and inflections; while derivational morphemes can change the lexical category of a base word (e.g. indicate – indication), inflectional morphemes serve to identify words as members of a particular class (e.g. English words that are inflected with and are necessarily verbs). Syntactic cues are also of critical importance to word class assignment; these are the co-occurrence properties of a word with adjacent lexical items, that is, the distribution of certain classes of words.
For example, English verbs are often preceded by Jo-forms; this is one of the syntactic cues that distinguishes them from adjectives, which are typically preceded by a form of be or get (cf. Braine, 1987; Maratsos, 1988). Syntactic cues of this type are viewed as essential to the categorisation of words into classes, as demonstrated by connectionist models (Finch & Chater, 1992, 1994), statistical networks of large language corpora (Redington & Chater, 1998), artificial language-learning studies (Mintz, 2002), and studies of child-directed speech (Cartwright & Brent, 1997; Mintz, 2003; Mintz et al., 2002; Redington, Chater, & Finch, 1998). Finally, word meaning may also be an indicator of word class. For L2 learners, using semantic information in assigning word class means finding the LI equivalent. For example, upon learning the word libra in Spanish, an English-speaking learner can simply rely on the LI equivalent (‘book’) and correctly classify the new word as a noun. In this sense, positive transfer is expected to occur in the semantic domain because L1-L2 exact equivalents will belong to the same word class (Sunderman & Kroll, 2006).
Viewed in this way, word class is not strictly a problem of vocabulary learning but rather one of categorisation; the learner must attend to multiple linguistic cues (morphological, syntactic, and semantic) in order to arrive at the correct classification of lexical items in the input. In order to exploit syntactic cues to word class, the learner must already know something about the distributional regularities of the language. Crucially, this entire process is understood to be largely implicit. Ellis (2007, p. 21) defines implicit learning as the ‘acquisition of knowledge about the underlying structure of a complex stimulus environment by a process that takes place naturally, simply, and without conscious operations’. The fact that adult native speakers are often unable to verbalise their knowledge of word classes is strong evidence for the implicit mode of learning.
The ability to label a word correctly as a noun or a verb should not be confused with the tacit knowledge of using words correctly according to the grammatical properties of their class. Although L2 learners may display more robust explicit knowledge of word classes, categorising newly learned words is still a matter of abstracting the regularities from the L2 input and/or deriving word class information from the LI (i.e. positive transfer). Accordingly, of interest to the current study are the cues that L2 learners attend to when faced with a word class contrast that is whether they notice the morphological and/or syntactic cues in the input, whether they rely on LI equivalents, or whether they make use of other mechanisms such as perceived word frequency and familiarity with particular forms?
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