A case for agreement

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kira Gor ◽  
Anna Chrabaszcz ◽  
Svetlana Cook
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Fundamental Property ◽  
Nonnative Speakers ◽  
Single Word ◽  
Nominative Case ◽  
Functional Load ◽  
The Hierarchical Structure ◽  
Case Type ◽  
Type Frequency ◽  
Citation Form

Abstract Previous research on Russian nominal inflection reports a processing advantage for the Nominative case, the citation form, in native and highly proficient nonnative speakers (Gor, Chrabaszcz, & Cook, 2017). However, it remains unclear whether this advantage is present only in single-word presentation, or it is a fundamental property of lexical storage and access. Moreover, it is unknown whether the processing costs for different cases in native and nonnative word recognition reflect the hierarchical structure of the nominal paradigm where cases have different functional load and type frequency. We report two lexical decision experiments with cross-modal morphosyntactic priming, which compare the processing of case-inflected noun targets preceded by adjective primes with ambiguous oblique-case inflections by native speakers, early (heritage) and late learners of Russian. While all groups showed a processing advantage for the citation form, only native speakers and highly proficient late learners were sensitive to the oblique-case type frequency hierarchy.

Perception of Speech Acts Categories in Donald Trump’s Tweets by Native and Nonnative Speakers of English

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-82
Author(s):  
Davood Souri ◽  
Ali Merç
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Nonnative Speakers ◽  
Background Knowledge ◽  
English Teachers ◽  
Large Majority ◽  
Contextual Variables ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Nonnative Speakers Of English

Twitter plays an important role in today’s world. Its role among politicians and those who are interested in politics is more obvious. Due to its importance and special characteristics such as character limits, it has drawn the attention of many researchers including linguists and ELT researchers. This study aimed to compare the perceptions of native and nonnative speakers in identifying speech acts in Donald Trump’s tweets. The subjects of this study were nine English native speakers and twenty nonnative English teachers who were Turkish citizens. Thirty- seven tweets of Donald Trump over the course of a week were selected and the participants were asked to identify the speech acts of the tweets based on the speech acts taxonomy by Searle (1976). The analysis of the data revealed that both native and nonnative speakers of English identified the speech acts of the large majority of the tweets very differently. These differences were partly due to lack of enough political as well as background knowledge and partly due to lack of contextual variables.

English as an international language

2008 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 28.1-28.16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Clyne ◽  
Farzad Sharifian
Keyword(s):  
Intercultural Communication ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Rapid Evolution ◽  
Nonnative Speakers ◽  
Position Paper ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
International Language ◽  
The World ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Key Dimensions

In recent years, there has been a rapid evolution in the demographics of English speaking communities and individuals around the world, with an unprecedented growth in the number of users and learners of English. In the majority of cases, these learners and users are those who would traditionally have been classified as “non-native” speakers. This trend towards non-native speakers far outweighing native speakers in number is projected to pick up speed. The evolving nature of English in this context of its globalisation has called for a reassessment of a number of key dimensions in applied linguistic studies of English. Scholarly debates have surfaced about various political issues including the validity of the old distinction between “native” and “nonnative” speakers, what form English should – or is likely to – take as a language of international/intercultural communication (or lingua franca), and which groups are empowered and which ones disadvantaged by the accelerating prominence of English. Collectively, the essays in this issue of the journal engage with these issues in order to take the debate up to the next level. This article is a position paper which offers to open up the forum and to expand on some of some of these fundamental questions.

Complex Structures in the Child-Directed Speech of Native and Nonnative Speakers

2018 ◽  
pp. 127-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aslı Altan ◽  
Erika Hoff
Keyword(s):  
Language Learning ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Nonnative Speakers ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Complex Structures ◽  
Child Interaction ◽  
Mother Child Interaction ◽  
Bilingual Communities

Children in bilingual communities are frequently exposed to speech from nonnative speakers, but little research has described how that input might differ from the input of native speakers. There is evidence that input from nonnative speakers might be less useful to language learning children, but little research has asked why. This chapter analyzes the frequency of complex structures in the child-directed speech of 30 native English speakers and 36 nonnative speakers who were late learners of English, all speaking English to their two-and-a-half-year-old children. All instances of nine categories of complex structures were coded in transcripts of mother-child interaction. The frequency of all but one category was greater in the speech of native speakers. These findings suggest that input provided by native speakers provides more frequent models of complex structures than nonnative input.

scholarly journals Agreement attraction in native and nonnative speakers of German

2018 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 619-647 ◽  
Author(s):  
SOL LAGO ◽  
CLAUDIA FELSER
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Second Language Learners ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Nonnative Speakers ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
Russian Speakers ◽  
Second Language Speakers ◽  
Linear Distance ◽  
The Subject

ABSTRACTSecond language speakers often struggle to apply grammatical constraints such as subject–verb agreement. One hypothesis for this difficulty is that it results from problems suppressing syntactically unlicensed constituents in working memory. We investigated which properties of these constituents make them more likely to elicit errors: their grammatical distance to the subject head or their linear distance to the verb. We used double modifier constructions (e.g., the smell of the stables of the farmers), where the errors of native speakers are modulated by the linguistic relationships between the nouns in the subject phrase: second plural nouns, which are syntactically and semantically closer to the subject head, elicit more errors than third plural nouns, which are linearly closer to the verb (2nd-3rd-noun asymmetry). In order to dissociate between grammatical and linear distance, we compared embedded and coordinated modifiers, which were linearly identical but differed in grammatical distance. Using an attraction paradigm, we showed that German native speakers and proficient Russian speakers of German exhibited similar attraction rates and that their errors displayed a 2nd-3rd-noun asymmetry, which was more pronounced in embedded than in coordinated constructions. We suggest that both native and second language learners prioritize linguistic structure over linear distance in their agreement computations.

scholarly journals The use of collocations across proficiency levels: a literature review

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 34129
Author(s):  
Larissa Goulart
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Literature Review ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Word Association ◽  
Linguistic Competence ◽  
Single Word ◽  
Formulaic Language ◽  
Correct Word ◽  
Proficiency Levels ◽  
L2 Learners

This literature review focuses on the use of formulaic language by English as a second language students (L2). Research on the field of phraseology has shown that mastery of formulas is central for fluency and linguistic competence (Ellis, 1996). Studies on the use of formulaic language by native speakers (Ellis et al., 2008) have shown that native speakers process these structures as a single word. Considering the use of formulaic language by L2 students, research has shown that this can be problematic to learners as they do not know the correct word association (Men, 2018). This paper presents a literature review on the studies of formulaic language, more specifically of collocations, used by L2 learners. The first part of this paper deals with the different definitions of collocations, while the second part focuses on studies on collocation use by L2 learners.

Effect of Visual Cuing on Synthetic Speech Intelligibility: A Comparison of Native and Nonnative Speakers of English

1997 ◽  
Vol 84 (2) ◽  
pp. 695-698 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary E. Reynolds ◽  
Donald Fucci ◽  
Z. S. Bond
Keyword(s):  
Background Noise ◽  
Speech Intelligibility ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Nonnative Speakers ◽  
Synthetic Speech ◽  
Signal To Noise ◽  
Noise Condition ◽  
Nonnative Speakers Of English

This study compared the effect of visual cuing on the intelligibility of DECtalk for native and nonnative speakers of English in both ideal listening conditions and in the presence of background noise at a signal to noise (S/N) ratio of + 10dB. Visual cuing improved DECtalk's intelligibility for normative speakers more than for native speakers, especially in the background noise condition. Implications of these findings and the need for further research are discussed.

scholarly journals Processing reflexives in a second language: The timing of structural and discourse-level constraints

2011 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 571-603 ◽  
Author(s):  
CLAUDIA FELSER ◽  
IAN CUNNINGS
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
First Language ◽  
Nonnative Speakers ◽  
Binding Condition ◽  
Reflexive Pronouns ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
Nonnative Speakers Of English ◽  
Language Influence

ABSTRACTWe report the results from two eye-movement monitoring experiments examining the processing of reflexive pronouns by proficient German-speaking learners of second language (L2) English. Our results show that the nonnative speakers initially tried to link English argument reflexives to a discourse-prominent but structurally inaccessible antecedent, thereby violating binding condition A. Our native speaker controls, in contrast, showed evidence of applying condition A immediately during processing. Together, our findings show that L2 learners’ initial focusing on a structurally inaccessible antecedent cannot be due to first language influence and is also independent of whether the inaccessible antecedent c-commands the reflexive. This suggests that unlike native speakers, nonnative speakers of English initially attempt to interpret reflexives through discourse-based coreference assignment rather than syntactic binding.

FORM–MEANING MAPPING IN VOCABULARY ACQUISITION IN A SECOND LANGUAGE

2002 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 617-637 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nan Jiang
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Vocabulary Acquisition ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
First Language ◽  
Nonnative Speakers ◽  
Semantic Relatedness ◽  
Semantic Content ◽  
English Word ◽  
Nonnative English Speakers ◽  
Semantic Judgment

The mapping of lexical form to meaning is an important part of vocabulary acquisition in a second language (L2). This study examines the proposition that L2 lexical forms are often mapped to the existing semantic content of their first language (L1) translations rather than to new semantic specifications of their own. Native and nonnative English speakers were asked to perform two semantic judgment tasks in which they had to determine the degree of semantic relatedness of English word pairs (experiment 1) or to decide whether two English words were related in meaning (experiment 2). The nonnative speakers, but not the native speakers, were found to provide higher rating scores on or responded faster to L2 word pairs sharing the same L1 translations than to L2 word pairs that do not. The finding is interpreted as strong evidence in support of the presence of L1 semantic content in L2 lexical entries.

scholarly journals The Acquisition of Community Speech Norms by Asian Immigrants Learning English as a Second Language

1991 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. D. Adamson ◽  
Vera M. Regan
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
Program Analysis ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
Nonnative Speakers ◽  
Noun Phrases ◽  
Asian Immigrants ◽  
Anterior Segments ◽  
Cambodian Immigrants

We investigate Vietnamese and Cambodian immigrants' acquisition of the variable (ing), which occurs in progressive tenses, participles, noun phrases, etc., and which can be pronounced [iŋ] or [In]. A VARBRUL 2 program analysis of native speaker speech shows that the production of (ing) is constrained by phonological, grammatical, stylistic, and social factors. An analysis of the nonnative speakers' acquisition of these norms shows that [In] is more frequent before anterior segments (reflecting ease of articulation), and that males use [In] more frequently than females, especially in monitored speech (perhaps reflecting their desire to accommodate to a male native speaker norm rather than to an overall native speaker norm). The analysis also shows evidence of grammatical constraints which are different from those in the native speakers' speech. This difference may reflect the fact that it is easier to acquire the [In] variant in “frozen forms,” such as prepositions, than in productive rules.

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