Lähdekieli kielenoppimisen apuna

Abstract

Annekatrin Kaivapalu on väitöskirjassaan tutkinut virolaisten ja venäläisten lukiolaisten suomen kielen nominien monikkotaivutuksen omaksumista. Kaivapalu selvitti, oppivatko virolaiset suomen taivutuksen helpommin kuin venäläiset oppijat, joiden äidinkielestä vastaavat taivutusmallit puuttuvat. Läheisten sukukielten, kuten viro ja suomi, oppimisessa äidinkielen vaikutus opittavan kielen omaksumiseen osoittautui huomattavasti myönteisemmäksi kuin aikaisemmat tutkimustulokset ovat osoittaneet.

This study investigates the effect of Estonian as the mother tongue on the acquisition of Finnish, a closely related language, with particular regard to plural inflection of Finnish nouns. The aims of the study are to determine the essential nature of first language influence on morphology, what constrains it and how it interacts with other factors, and to assess the positive influence of a closely related source language.The subjects of this study were two test groups, one of 30 Estonian high school students and the other of 30 Russian high-school students. The data were gathered by means of written and oral inflection tests. First of all learners were asked to inflect 30 context-free words in the partitive, illative and elative plural. The second task of the test was designed to elicit the same plural forms of the test words in written narratives. In order to determine how written and oral processing differ from each other, some of the Estonian- and some of the Russian-speaking subjects were given the task of inflecting context-free words orally a few weeks before the written test. Another source of data consisted of the tape-recorded comments of the learners while performing this task.The study concludes that the source language has an important role among the factors influencing the inflection of plural forms of Finnish nouns. As predicted, the positive influence of source language morphology is at its greatest in the case of words with the same or a very similar stem and inflection in the source and target languages. The influence of the source language acts in conjunction with other factors in the inflectional process of target language in different ways in different contexts and on different occasions. The choice of processing strategy also depends, at least partly, on the particular source language and the level of learner’s target language skills. In closely related languages such as Finnish and Estonian the influence of the source language on inflectional morphology is considerably more positive than former studies have argued.