Language Family Relationship Preserved in Non-native English

Mother tongue interference is the phenomenon where linguistic systems of a mother tongue are transferred to another language. Recently, Nagata and Whittaker (2013) have shown that language family relationship among mother tongues is preserved in English written by IndoEuropean language speakers because of mother tongue interference. At the same time, their findings further introduce the following two research questions: (1) Does the preservation universally hold in non-native English other than in English of Indo-European language speakers? (2) Is the preservation independent of proficiency in English? In this paper, we address these research questions. We first explore the two research questions empirically by reconstructing language family trees from English texts written by speakers of Asian languages. We then discuss theoretical reasons for the empirical results. We finally introduce another hypothesis called the existence of a probabilistic module to explain why the preservation does or does not hold in particular situations.