Telling good stories in different languages

2008 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Masahiko Minami
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Complex Nature ◽  
Emotional Information ◽  
Native Japanese Speakers ◽  
Good Story ◽  
Sequence Of Events ◽  
Japanese Speakers ◽  
Chronological Sequence

There are many ways to tell a story, but whether a story is good or bad depends on whether or not the listener/reader can comprehend all that the speaker/writer wants to convey in his or her story. This study examines the characteristics of stories that native speakers of given languages consider to be good. Forty English-Japanese bilingual children ages six to twelve were asked to narrate a picture storybook in both English and Japanese. Also involved in the study were 16 adult native Japanese speakers and 16 adult native English speakers who evaluated the stories produced by the bilingual children. An analysis of narratives receiving high ratings from evaluators shows that most stories considered good in English or Japanese should be lengthy stories with a large and varied vocabulary, and should be told in the past tense. In addition to those similarities in effective stories told in the two languages, we also found dissimilarities between “good” stories in English and “good” stories in Japanese. English evaluators felt that relating a series of events in chronological order is only one part of a good story. Providing evaluative comments (i.e., statements or words that tell the listener/reader what the narrator thinks about a person, place, thing, or event) is an indispensable part of telling good stories. So, in stories in English, aside from the standard expectation of a sequential series of events, providing the listener with emotional information is considered equally important. On the other hand, Japanese speakers accepted stories that emphasize a temporal sequence of action with less emphasis on nonsequential information, especially evaluative descriptions, and which effectively use passive forms and subject-referencing markers to enable a clear chronological sequence of events. Because the standards of what makes a good story may differ in the home and school languages/cultures, and because of the complex nature of such differences as shown in this study, it seems advisable that schools intervene and support the development of bilingual children’s skills in the use of the mainstream culture’s standards.

scholarly journals Acquisition of English verb transitivity by native speakers of Japanese

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 3
Author(s):  
Tomonori Nagano
Keyword(s):  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Frequency Effects ◽  
Semantic Class ◽  
Native Japanese Speakers ◽  
Semantic Classes ◽  
Japanese Speakers ◽  
English Verb

This on-going study is concerned with native Japanese speakers’ acquisition of English verb semantic classes, especially those participating in the English causative alternation. Twenty-two native English speakers and 34 native Japanese speakers were asked to judge the grammaticality of verbs from different semantic classes in transitive (e.g., “X disappeared/touched/moved Y”) and intransitive constructions (e.g., “X/Y disappeared/touched/moved”). Data suggest that L2 learners are sensitive to frequency effects when verbs are not prototypical members of a verb semantic class. I discuss possible interactions between frequency effects and L1/L2 verb semantic classes in second language acquisition.

English and Japanese interlanguage comprehension strategies: An analysis based on the competition model

1991 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yoshinori Sasaki
Keyword(s):  
First Language ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
English Word ◽  
Competition Model ◽  
Comprehension Strategies ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Response Patterns ◽  
Native Japanese Speakers ◽  
Japanese Speakers ◽  
Japanese Word

ABSTRACTIn an experiment based on the competition model, 12 native Japanese speakers (J1 group) and 12 native English speakers studying Japanese (JFL group) were requested to report sentence subjects after listening to Japanese word strings which consisted of one verb and two nouns each. Similarly, 12 native English speakers (E1 group) and 12 native Japanese speakers studying English (EFL group) reported the sentence subjects of English word strings. In each word string, syntactic (word order) cues and lexical-semantic (animacy/inanimacy) cues converged or diverged as to the assignment of the sentence subjects. The results show that JFL-Ss (experimental subjects) closely approximated the response patterns of J1-Ss, while EFL-Ss showed evidence of transfer from their first language, Japanese. The results are consistent with the developmental precedence of a meaning-based comprehension strategy over a grammar-based one.

Some cases of linguistic interference in Bulgarian in English-Bulgarian bilingual children and english native speakers learning Bulgarian as a second language

Proglas ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Iliyana Dimitrova ◽  
◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
English Bilingual ◽  
Linguistic Interference ◽  
Children's Speech

he study examines some linguistic errors in the process of learning Bulgarian by Bulgarian-English bilingual children and by native English speakers who study Bulgarian as a second language. The emphasis is on some typical interference errors which are common (identical) for both the bilingual children’s speech and the speech of native English speakers learning Bulgarian as a second language. Based on the analyzed aberration corpus, the opinion we give is that many of the processes taking place during the acquisition of the Bulgarian language are the same for both bilingual children with English and native English speakers.

Generating predictions based on semantic categories in a second language: A case of numeral classifiers in Japanese

2020 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 323-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanako Mitsugi
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Facilitative Effect ◽  
Visual World ◽  
Numeral Classifiers ◽  
Native Japanese Speakers ◽  
Semantic Categories ◽  
Japanese Speakers

AbstractThis study examined whether native Japanese speakers and second language (L2) speakers of Japanese use information from numeral classifiers to predict possible referents. Using a visual-world eye-tracking paradigm, we asked participants to identify picture objects that take either the same or different numeral classifiers while they listened to Japanese sentences referring to one object. The results showed that native speakers looked to the target predictively more often when the classifier was informative about noun identity than when it was not. L2 learners also showed a facilitative effect of classifiers that was comparable to that of native speakers. In addition, we found that the level of proficiency played a role in the speed of real-time referent resolutions when the participants heard the target nouns in audio input. However, such an effect was not observed during the period when the predictions were generated.

scholarly journals Antecedent Retrieval with Repeated Name Anaphors in Japanese: Topic and Subject

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 663
Author(s):  
Shinichi Shoji
Keyword(s):  
First Language ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
The Other ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Native Japanese Speakers ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Japanese Speakers ◽  
Reading Experiment

The present study tested whether repeated-name anaphors in Japanese elicit different effects in retrieving antecedents, depending on the anaphors being either a topic anaphor appended with the topic marker wa or a non-topic anaphor with the nominative marker ga. Early studies have shown that pronoun anaphors facilitate faster retrieval of their antecedents relative to repeated name anaphors, when the anaphors are grammatical subjects that refer to salient antecedents. In Japanese, however, grammatical subjects can be further classified into topic-subjects marked by wa and non-topic subjects marked by ga. Therefore, different antecedent-retrieval patterns may be possible between topic-wa and topic-ga even when they both were repeated-name anaphors. In addition, the present study investigated this issue with native English speakers who were learners of Japanese. Because their first language, English, does not overtly mark an entity as topic or non-topic, it was predicted that they might be relatively insensitive to anaphors’ topic-hood and may not show different effects between topic-wa and non-topic-ga. A self-paced reading experiment showed that native Japanese speakers retrieved antecedents faster for repeated-name topic-wa anaphors than for non-topic-ga. On the other hand, native English speakers showed only marginally faster retrieval of antecedents for topic anaphors compared with to non-topic anaphors.

scholarly journals Development of the ability to lexically encode novel second language phonemic contrasts

2008 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Hayes-Harb ◽  
Kyoko Masuda
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
First Year ◽  
Native Japanese Speakers ◽  
Lexical Representations ◽  
Phonological Structure ◽  
Native Speakers Of English ◽  
One Year ◽  
Phonemic Contrasts

Second language (L2) learners must often learn to perceive and produce novel L2 phoneme contrasts. Although both research and intuition suggest that these difficulties can be overcome to some extent with exposure to the L2, it is not known what consequences this kind of learning has for the phonological structure of the L2 lexicon. We present an experiment designed to investigate the lexical representations that learners establish for L2 words that contain novel phonemic contrasts. Specifically, we consider the acquisition of Japanese consonant length contrasts by native speakers of English: Japanese contrasts consonants such as /k/ and /kk/ while English does not. The results indicate that native English speakers do not initially encode consonant length consistently in their lexical representations of Japanese words, as reflected in both listening and production tasks. However, after one year of Japanese experience, the phonological structure of their Japanese lexicon more closely approximates that of native Japanese speakers. We conclude that significant changes to the structure of the L2 lexicon can occur even within the first year of L2 learning.

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