Author(s)

Zhang Hua, Wang Minxia

Corresponding Author

Zhang Hua

Abstract

Many researches show that there is a “natural order” of the acquisition of grammatical morphemes in ESL, but little concern about the explanation of the order findings. Goldschneider and Dekeyser apply the meta-analysis by collecting all the data from the present studies on the “natural order” and investigate five potential predictors which might determine that order: perceptual predictors, semantic complexity, morphonological regularity, syntactic category and frequency. Their conclusion is beneficial to the study of SLA. However, the author believes language transfer might be one more determinant on the basis of analysis of more SLA researches.

Keywords

Meta-analysis; acquisition; morphemes; natural order; language transfer