Adjectival and verbal agreement in the oral production of early and late bilinguals

2021 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 371-401
Author(s):  
Irma Alarcón
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Age Of Acquisition ◽  
High Agreement ◽  
Oral Production ◽  
Task Effects ◽  
L2 Learners ◽  
L2 Spanish ◽  
Verbal Agreement ◽  
And Task ◽  
Late Bilinguals

Abstract Extended oral production has seldom been used to explore adjectival and verbal agreement in L2 Spanish. This study examines oral narrations to compare the agreement behavior, speech rates, and patterns of errors of highly proficient Spanish heritage and L2 learners (early and late bilinguals, respectively), whose L1 is English, with those of native controls. Although both bilingual groups displayed high agreement accuracy scores, only the early bilinguals performed at or close to ceiling. In addition, the L2 learners spoke significantly more slowly than the heritage and native speakers, who displayed similar speech rates. Explanations accounting for the differences in speech rates and agreement accuracy include age of acquisition of Spanish, syntactic distance between a noun and its adjective, and task effects. All of these factors favored the early bilinguals, enhancing their advantages over L2 learners. Findings suggest that the integrated knowledge and automatic access needed for native-like attainment in agreement behavior in extended oral production is more easily achievable by early than by late bilinguals.

The role of experience in the acquisition and production of diminutives and gender in Spanish: Evidence from L2 learners and heritage speakers

2013 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Silvina Montrul ◽  
Israel de la Fuente ◽  
Justin Davidson ◽  
Rebecca Foote
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Language Experience ◽  
Gender Agreement ◽  
Early Language ◽  
Heritage Speakers ◽  
Oral Production ◽  
Early Language Development ◽  
L2 Learners ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Advanced Proficiency

This study examined whether type of early language experience provides advantages to heritage speakers over second language (L2) learners with morphology, and investigated knowledge of gender agreement and its interaction with diminutive formation. Diminutives are a hallmark of Child Directed Speech in early language development and a highly productive morphological mechanism that facilitates the acquisition of declensional noun endings in many languages (Savickienė and Dressler, 2007). In Spanish, diminutives regularize gender marking in nouns with a non-canonical ending. Twenty-four Spanish native speakers, 29 heritage speakers and 37 L2 learners with intermediate to advanced proficiency completed two picture-naming tasks and an elicited production task. Results showed that the heritage speakers were more accurate than the L2 learners with gender agreement in general, and with non-canonical ending nouns in particular. This study confirms that early language experience and the type of input received confer some advantages to heritage speakers over L2 learners with early-acquired aspects of language, especially in oral production.

Comprehension of conversational implicatures in L2 English

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 373-408 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yılmaz Köylü
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Pragmatic Competence ◽  
Visual Interpretation ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Oral Production ◽  
Conversational Implicatures ◽  
L2 Learners ◽  
Native Speakers Of English ◽  
Cross Sectional Design ◽  
Learner Responses

Abstract This study investigated the development of the ability to interpret conversational implicatures in English as an L2. The study followed a cross-sectional design and used a methodologically innovative audio-visual interpretation task with an oral production component. By orally reporting their interpretations, participants demonstrated comprehension of conversational implicatures viewed in a video, rather than employing a predetermined response approach used in earlier studies, which neither explore nor reveal how L2 learners understand implicatures. Fifty participants, forty-five learners at three proficiency levels and five native speakers of English, took part in the study. The results indicated that the comprehension of conversational implicatures showed a significant improvement as L2 proficiency increased. Learner responses were additionally coded based on stages of implicature calculation, which demonstrated that not only learners’ correct interpretations but also their incorrect responses provide insights into their interlanguage development. Such a finding further illustrates the superiority of a free response approach over a predetermined one since the former approach can better shed light on L2 learners’ true pragmatic competence in conversational implicatures.

scholarly journals The interface of linguistic difficulty and task type on the use of the Chinese ba construction by L2 learners

2014 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaoping Gao
Keyword(s):  
Adult Learners ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Second Language Learners ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Task Type ◽  
Oral Production ◽  
Video Clips ◽  
Functional Value ◽  
Ba Construction ◽  
And Task

AbstractThis study investigates the effects of linguistic difficulty and task type on the use of Chinese ba construction by second language learners. One hundred and ten adult learners completed four tasks orally (i.e., an oral production task prompted by video clips, an oral imitation task, a grammaticality judgement task and a correction task), as well as a background questionnaire and a one-on-one post-task interview. Twenty-two native speakers of Chinese served as baseline. Results demonstrate that the variable type of the Chinese ba construction which is subject to functional constraints is harder to learn than the obligatory type which is subject to obligatory syntactic constraints, and that the oral tasks were more challenging to perform than the metalinguistic tasks. The findings suggest that a series of factors including functional value and discourse context contribute to the linguistic difficulty of Chinese grammar features. The processing constraints of completing tasks and their interaction with linguistic characteristics explain the learning difficulty of the two types of the ba construction.

Cue-Weighting mechanism and bilingualism

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 708-709 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANNIE TREMBLAY ◽  
CAITLIN E. COUGHLIN
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Age Of Acquisition ◽  
Retrieval Cues ◽  
Cue Weighting ◽  
L2 Learners ◽  
Weighting Mechanism ◽  
Forward Looking

Cunnings’ proposed theory can explain why second language (L2) learners have difficulty resolving certain types of dependencies (i.e., backward-looking dependencies) but not others (i.e., forward-looking dependencies). However, his theory should be more explicit about the mechanism underlying late L2 learners’ and native speakers’ different weightings of retrieval cues, and research framed within his theory should strive to tease apart age-of-acquisition effects from bilingualism effects.

Defective adjectival inflection in non-native German: Prosodic transfer or missing surface inflection?

2008 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 259-286 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol Jaensch
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Universal Grammar ◽  
Gap Filling ◽  
Oral Production ◽  
Syntactic Features ◽  
Adjectival Inflection ◽  
L2 Learners ◽  
Prosodic Transfer ◽  
L1 And L2

Two recent hypotheses which support the theory of full access to Universal Grammar have been proposed in order to account for variant data supplied by L2 learners. The Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis (Goad, White & Steele 2003) suggests that non-target-like behaviour by L2 learners is partially due to the differences in prosody between the L1 and L2 and the ensuing prosodic constraints; whilst the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis (Prévost & White 2000) proposes that problems are due to the learners’ variability in mapping abstract syntactic features onto morphological forms. This paper discusses a study of Japanese native speakers acquiring L3 German adjectival inflection in light of these two hypotheses. Data are provided from a written gap-filling task and from two oral production tasks. The results indicate stronger support for the MSIH.

Density and complexity of oral production in interaction: The interactionist approach and an alternative

2015 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Masatoshi Sato
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Peer Interaction ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Conversational Interaction ◽  
Oral Production ◽  
L2 Learners ◽  
Interaction Research ◽  
Interactionist Approach

AbstractThis study examined conversational interaction between second language (L2) learners and native speakers (NSs). While L2 interaction research has traditionally quantified interactional moves – the interactionist approach, the present study examined various surface linguistic indices (e.g., MLUs, number of verb and noun types, and TTRs) and compared learner-learner vs. learner-NS interaction. The results indicated that learners and NSs were comparable in terms of the amount of production but the NSs’ speech contained more grammatical and lexical variability with a larger mean proportion of copula omissions. This foreigner talk was found to be correlated with learners’ errors. When learners’ output in the two conditions was compared, it was found that learners produced more verb (but not noun) types with larger MLUs and TTRs in the peer interaction context.

Predictive sentence processing in L2 and L1

2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edith Kaan
Keyword(s):  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Lexical Representation ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Ample Evidence ◽  
L2 Learners ◽  
Anticipatory Behavior ◽  
Processing Mechanisms ◽  
And Task

There is ample evidence that native speakers anticipate upcoming information at various levels during sentence comprehension. In contrast, some studies on late second-language (L2) learners support the view that L2 learners do not anticipate information during processing, or at least, not to the same extent as native speakers do. In the current paper, I propose that native and L2 speakers are underlyingly the same as far as sentence processing mechanisms are concerned, and that potential differences in anticipatory behavior can be accounted for by the same factors that drive individual differences in native speakers; in particular, differences in frequency biases, competing information, the accuracy and consistency of the lexical representation, and task-induced effects. Suggestions for future research are provided.

The Production of Gesture and Speech by People With Aphasia: Influence of Communicative Constraints

2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (12) ◽  
pp. 4417-4432 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carola de Beer ◽  
Jan P. de Ruiter ◽  
Martina Hielscher-Fastabend ◽  
Katharina Hogrefe
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Daily Living ◽  
Linguistic Performance ◽  
Task Effects ◽  
Communicative Abilities ◽  
Gesture Production ◽  
And Task ◽  
Group Effects

Purpose People with aphasia (PWA) use different kinds of gesture spontaneously when they communicate. Although there is evidence that the nature of the communicative task influences the linguistic performance of PWA, so far little is known about the influence of the communicative task on the production of gestures by PWA. We aimed to investigate the influence of varying communicative constraints on the production of gesture and spoken expression by PWA in comparison to persons without language impairment. Method Twenty-six PWA with varying aphasia severities and 26 control participants (CP) without language impairment participated in the study. Spoken expression and gesture production were investigated in 2 different tasks: (a) spontaneous conversation about topics of daily living and (b) a cartoon narration task, that is, retellings of short cartoon clips. The frequencies of words and gestures as well as of different gesture types produced by the participants were analyzed and tested for potential effects of group and task. Results Main results for task effects revealed that PWA and CP used more iconic gestures and pantomimes in the cartoon narration task than in spontaneous conversation. Metaphoric gestures, deictic gestures, number gestures, and emblems were more frequently used in spontaneous conversation than in cartoon narrations by both participant groups. Group effects show that, in both tasks, PWA's gesture-to-word ratios were higher than those for the CP. Furthermore, PWA produced more interactive gestures than the CP in both tasks, as well as more number gestures and pantomimes in spontaneous conversation. Conclusions The current results suggest that PWA use gestures to compensate for their verbal limitations under varying communicative constraints. The properties of the communicative task influence the use of different gesture types in people with and without aphasia. Thus, the influence of communicative constraints needs to be considered when assessing PWA's multimodal communicative abilities.

Creativity in context: Presses and task effects in negative creativity.

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 314-321 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hansika Kapoor ◽  
Azizuddin Khan
Keyword(s):  
Task Effects ◽  
And Task

Second language processing of English past tense morphology: The role of working memory

2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Filiz Rızaoğlu ◽  
Ayşe Gürel
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Second Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Negative Relationship ◽  
Masked Priming ◽  
Morphological Processing ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
L2 Learners

AbstractThis study examines, via a masked priming task, the processing of English regular and irregular past tense morphology in proficient second language (L2) learners and native speakers in relation to working memory capacity (WMC), as measured by the Automated Reading Span (ARSPAN) and Operation Span (AOSPAN) tasks. The findings revealed quantitative group differences in the form of slower reaction times (RTs) in the L2-English group. While no correlation was found between the morphological processing patterns and WMC in either group, there was a negative relationship between English and Turkish ARSPAN scores and the speed of word recognition in the L2 group. Overall, comparable decompositional processing patterns found in both groups suggest that, like native speakers, high-proficiency L2 learners are sensitive to the morphological structure of the target language.

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