Cross-Linguistic Influence on Evidential Marker Processing: Japanese Learners of Korean

Languages like Turkish, Korean, and Japanese employ grammatical morphemes to convey the source of information about an event, called evidentiality, specifying whether the information is obtained directly through sensory experience or indirectly through hearsay or inference. This study investigates whether second-language learners whose first language encodes evidentiality as a grammatical category transfer this knowledge when acquiring a second language that also expresses the source of information grammatically. Focusing on Japanese-speaking learners of Korean, we examined how they process Korean evidential markers during online sentence comprehension. Our results provide significant evidence of positive transfer: Japanese learners rejected mismatched evidential markers as unacceptable as quickly as Korean speakers, due to the advantages stemming from cross-linguistic similarities between Korean and Japanese. However, while weak, evidence of negative transfer also emerged, particularly in the processing of the inference marker (i.e., -kwun) and the direct perceptual marker (i.e., -tela), suggesting that linguistic differences existing in the two languages lead to processing difficulties. These findings underscore the complex interplay of positive and negative transfer in the second-language acquisition of evidentiality.