CAN A CUP BREAK? （昨天问题的答案，还有那个有名的试验）

这是那个试验的完整解释，答案在最后！

CAN A CUP BREAK? TRANSFERABILITY

In a series of seminal publications in the Netherlands, Eric Kellerman (1979, 1983, 1985) introduced an important notion in the study of L1 influences: transferability (you may also find the term psychotypology used in SLA to refer to the same concept). Transferability refers to the claim that L1 transfer is partly a function of learners’ (conscious or subconscious) intuitions about how transferable certain phenomena are. Choices in the L1 that are perceived to be marked or more ‘language specific’ are less likely to be transferred to the L2 than choices that are perceived to be unmarked or more ‘universal’ by learners. 

In Kellerman’s (1979) study, the acceptability of transitive and intransitive meanings of certain verbs was investigated with three different groups of L1 Dutch learners of English. Consider, for example, the verb break (English) and its Dutch counterpart breken. Both the transitive (breaking something) and the intransitive (something just breaks) meanings are possible in English and Dutch, as shown in these translation equivalents:

(2) a. He broke his leg → hij brak zijn been 

     b. The cup broke → het kopje brak

The results of the study afforded the SLA research community a few interesting surprises. A first group comprised Dutch students who were taking English in high school and whose proficiency in the L2 was just incipient. They accepted both the transitive and intransitive uses of such verbs correctly, almost 100 per cent of the time. One can argue that these learners were correct despite their beginning L2 proficiency probably because they were aided by the similarity in this area between English and Dutch. However, the answers given by a second group of 17- to 20-yearold Dutch students were wholly unexpected. They were enrolled in the last year of high school or the first two years of university, and therefore their proficiency in English was intermediate. This group correctly accepted all the transitive uses of ‘break’ (as in 2a), but they accepted the intransitive ones (as in 2b) only about 60 per cent of the time. What could have prevented this intermediate group of learners from using the L1 knowledge about brekento their advantage, just like the beginning learners in the same study obviously had? Also surprisingly, a third group of Dutch students with advanced proficiency (they were studying English in their third year of university) correctly accepted all transitive items (as in 2a) and, over 80 per cent of the time, they correctly accepted the intransitive items as well (as in 2b: het kopje brak, ‘the cup broke’). Granted, their performance was better than that of the intermediate group, but why would these advanced level students be correct at a rate that was lower than that of the beginning proficiency student group?

Kellerman suggested that the transitive option of verbs such as break (as in 2a) is intuited by learners to be semantically more transparent and syntactically more prototypical than the intransitive option (as in 2b). Things do not normally break on their own. Instead we naturally expect an animate or an inanimate agent (that is, someone or something) that does or causes the breaking. At the beginning stage of proficiency, Kellerman (1985) speculated, ‘[y]ounger learners, who have had less instruction and are less sophisticated metalinguistically, seem to be unconcerned about these distinctions’ (p. 349). They rely on their L1 knowledge and successfully arrive at a fully target-like response. However, as learners develop a more sophisticated knowledge of the language, they develop ‘a sensitivity to a pragmatic distinction (implicitly known) between the causative and the noncausative meanings of a single verb’ (p. 348). They go ‘beyond success’ (an expression that Kellerman, 1985, borrows from child language acquisition researcher Annette Karmiloff-Smith) and abstain from transferring the intransitive meaning from their L1. It is as if the intransitive meaning were perceived as too ‘marked’ or too ‘Dutch-sounding’ to be judged as transferable material. 

Clearly, Kellerman’s findings demonstrated that the judgement of whether something in the L1 is similar enough be transferred to the L2 is partly influenced by other factors beside externally driven L1–L2 comparisons. Based on these data, and the surprisingly different behaviour of three groups that shared the same Dutch L1 background but varied along the proficiency cline, Kellerman (1985) also noted that transferability interacts with L2 proficiency in shaping what may or may not get transferred, beyond L1–L2 apparent similarities or differences.

所以昨天的正确答案是：没有搞错的是初学者！