No effect of L1 on learners’ sensitivity to noun-adjective agreement patterns in an explicit judgment task

Abstract We investigated the role of cross-linguistic influence of learners’ first language on their L2 acquisition of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) by testing L2 learners’ perception of MSA noun-adjective agreement and comparing learners who have noun-adjective agreement in their L1 to those who do not. In a Grammaticality Judgment task, participants read MSA sentences that contained either grammatical or ungrammatical noun-adjective agreement patterns. Native speakers were more sensitive to grammaticality than learners were, and learners were better than chance. However, we found no reliable effects of L1 agreement. This finding aligns with prior results suggesting that cross-linguistic transfer is less likely in offline than in online tasks and suggests either that late L2 learners have sensitivity to the new grammar regardless of the patterns of their L1 or that the alignment between languages necessary for facilitation is more detailed than the simple presence or absence of agreement.