Learners show no first-language transfer for manner adverbs, judging sentence-final placement acceptable and pre-verbal placement unacceptable despite Chinese word order¶
Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · associationalr1·q2
Currency · newest study 2010 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person
Evidence quality · No study behind this claim is a peer-reviewed article with a DOI: it rests on an ERIC document (a report, conference paper or thesis). It is kept because 3 design pages cite it; treat it as a lead to check, not an established finding.
Subclaims¶
Reading the evidence codes
q is the design tier, i the impact, n the sample, and the kind with its r
the rigour judged within that kind: what each code means.
This claim: no standardized effect is recorded in observations/ for it yet, so no benchmark reading is possible.
q2 i? For sentences with manner adverbs, all ten learners agreed on acceptability, and the author attributes this pattern to UG-based parameter setting rather than L1 transfer. → ZHANG Zi-hong 2010
Evidence¶
ZHANG Zi-hong 2010¶
ZHANG Zi-hong. (2010). The syntactic positions of adverbs and the Second Language Acquisition. Sino-US English Teaching, 7(9), 48-54. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED514708
q2 · i? · associational · r1
In the ten-student judgment study, sentences d and f (manner adverbs sentence-finally) were judged well-formed and e and g unacceptable, with "no disagreement" among participants. The author states there is no influence of first language transfer because in Chinese these adverbs occur directly before verbs.
"for sentences d, e, f and g, there is no disagreement. All of them consider d and f are well -formed, while e and g are unacceptable."
Discussion¶
Related Claims¶
- Adult L2 learners can generally judge which English adverb placements are acceptable, based on true/false judgment data from ten college students — related
- L1-induced errors persist in advanced learners and risk fossilization if learners rely on compensatory communication strategies — reports the opposite
- The article concludes adult learners acquire two things about English adverbs: their general syntactic positions and their scope — related
- Mental representation is not amenable to direct explicit instruction because UG and parsers operate only on input data — related
- A 1999 conference paper reports, citing White (1991) and Schwartz and Gubala-Ryzak (1992), that explicit negative evidence on English adverb placement produced only superficial change in French learners — related
Page metadata
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
type |
claim |
id |
no-l1-transfer-manner-adverb-positions |
title |
Learners show no first-language transfer for manner adverbs, judging sentence-final placement acceptable and pre-verbal placement unacceptable despite Chinese word order |
description |
Learners show no first-language transfer for manner adverbs, judging sentence-final placement acceptable and pre-verbal placement unacceptable despite Chinese word order |
status |
review |
evidence_strength |
weak |
newest_evidence |
2010 |
generated |
by process:wiki-ingest on 2026-09-27 |
trust |
unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content |
sources |
1 — zhang-zi-hong-2010 |
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