First Language Transfer in the Acquisition of English Object Pronouns by Sinhala-Speaking ESL Learners

The current paper reports on an empirical study investigating the unlearning of null object pronouns by twenty-four English as a Second Language (ESL) learners from Sri Lanka. Further, the ESL learners are native Sinhala speakers. One of the main crosslinguistic differences between Sinhala and English is that Sinhala allows null object pronouns, whereas English does not. Previous studies have investigated the acquisition of object pronouns by ESL learners, and they report that the acquisition of object pronouns could be problematic for ESL learners due to first language transfer. However, there have been no empirical studies that investigate the unlearning of null arguments by Sinhala ESL learners. Therefore, the present study intends to fill the gap in the research by investigating the unlearning of null object pronouns by Sinhala ESL learners. The data were collected via an audio acceptability judgement task (audio AJT) and a production task (PT). In the audio AJT, the ESL learners accepted null object pronouns to a certain extent, whereas in the PT, they had a strong preference for null object pronouns. Therefore, based on the overall results, I suggest that Sinhala ESL learners have difficulty in unlearning null object pronouns in English.