L2 knowledge of verb placement by Japanese learners of English

This paper reports on an experiment which examined the knowledge of verb placement by Japanese learners of English (JLEs). The results of two grammaticality judgement tasks indicated that JLEs acquire the unavailability of an NP-shift operation relatively early, but their judgements of sentences involving V-raising (i.e., illicit *SV-Adv-O word order) was indecisive up to the Intermediate level, and this seemed to improve at the Advanced level. On the other hand, the results of a sentence matching task showed that no JLE group clearly differentiated the +/-V-raising word orders in terms of their matching speed for both the present and the past tense contexts. The results are interpreted to indicate the possibility that JLEs can learn the overt word order facts, but never end up with the same grammatical representation of V-raising parameter as native speakers. This supports the hypotheses arguing for impairment of grammatical features in second language acquisition.