The role of age and timing in bilingual assessment: non-word repetition, subject-verb agreement and case marking in L1 and eL2 children with and without SLI

This study focuses on the production of subject–verb (SV) agreement in number in L2 French and investigates the role of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in this particular morphosyntactic domain. CLI is a well-known phenomenon in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research but it has rarely been investigated systematically in relation to SV agreement in French. The participants of the study are 114 learners with Italian, German, Dutch and Swedish as L1. The source languages are all inflectional languages but they vary in terms of morphological richness in the verb paradigm, ranging from very poor (Swedish) to very rich (Italian). The participants performed an oral narrative task contrasting singular and plural contexts of SV agreement. Results indicate a significant difference between L1 groups in terms of correct SV agreement but they also show that the overall presence of rich verb morphology in the L1 does not, on its own, result in a more correct SV agreement. It is when comparing learners at two different proficiency levels that we observe differences in the rate of L2 development, which may be explained as an effect of CLI. Overall, results indicate a complex interplay of different factors, where the role of CLI must be further investigated in future studies in relation to L2 French.

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Honorifics: A sociocultural verb agreement cue in Japanese sentence processing

Applied Psycholinguistics ◽

10.1017/s0142716410000111 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 31 (3) ◽

pp. 551-569 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

YUKI YOSHIMURA ◽

BRIAN MACWHINNEY

Keyword(s):

Second Language ◽

Language Learners ◽

Sentence Processing ◽

Word Order ◽

Second Language Learners ◽

Native Speakers ◽

Role Assignment ◽

Verb Agreement ◽

Case Marking ◽

New Type

ABSTRACTCase marking is the major cue to sentence interpretation in Japanese, whereas animacy and word order are much weaker. However, when subjects and their cases markers are omitted, Japanese honorific and humble verbs can provide information that compensates for the missing case role markers. This study examined the usage of honorific and humble verbs as cues to case role assignment by Japanese native speakers and second-language learners of Japanese. The results for native speakers replicated earlier findings regarding the predominant strength of case marking. However, when case marking was missing, native speakers relied more on honorific marking than word order. In these sentences, the processing that relied on the honorific cue was delayed by about 100 ms in comparison to processing that relied on the case-marking cue. Learners made extensive use of the honorific agreement cue, but their use of the cue was much less accurate than that of native speakers. In particular, they failed to systematically invoke the agreement cue when case marking was missing. Overall, the findings support the predictions of the model and extend its coverage to a new type of culturally determined cue.

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Ambiguity avoidance as a factor in the rise of the English dative alternation

Cognitive Linguistics ◽

10.1515/cog-2021-0018 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 0 (0) ◽

Author(s):

Eva Zehentner

Keyword(s):

Quantitative Analysis ◽

Middle English ◽

Language Change ◽

Cognitive Factors ◽

Case Marking ◽

Dative Alternation ◽

Cue Reliability ◽

History Of ◽

Potential Impact

Abstract This paper discusses the role of cognitive factors in language change; specifically, it investigates the potential impact of argument ambiguity avoidance on the emergence of one of the most well-studied syntactic alternations in English, viz. the dative alternation (We gave them cake vs We gave cake to them). Linking this development to other major changes in the history of English like the loss of case marking, I propose that morphological as well as semantic-pragmatic ambiguity between prototypical agents (subjects) and prototypical recipients (indirect objects) in ditransitive clauses plausibly gave a processing advantage to patterns with higher cue reliability such as prepositional marking, but also fixed clause-level (SVO) order. The main hypotheses are tested through a quantitative analysis of ditransitives in a corpus of Middle English, which (i) confirms that the spread of the PP-construction is impacted by argument ambiguity and (ii) demonstrates that this change reflects a complex restructuring of disambiguation strategies.

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German children’s processing of morphosyntactic cues in wh-questions

Applied Psycholinguistics ◽

10.1017/s0142716418000334 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 39 (6) ◽

pp. 1279-1318 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

ATTY SCHOUWENAARS ◽

PETRA HENDRIKS ◽

ESTHER RUIGENDIJK

Keyword(s):

Working Memory ◽

Eye Tracking ◽

Selection Task ◽

Typically Developing ◽

Garden Path ◽

Verb Agreement ◽

Case Marking ◽

Wh Questions ◽

German Children

ABSTRACTTwo experiments investigated the effects of case and verb agreement cues on the comprehension and production of which-questions in typically developing German children (aged 7–10) and adults. Our aims were to determine (a) whether they make use of morphosyntactic cues (case marking and verb agreement) for the comprehension of which-questions, (b) how these questions are processed, and (c) whether the presence and position of morphosyntactic cues available for the listener influence the speaker’s production of which-questions. Performance on a picture selection task with eye tracking shows that children with low working memory make less use of morphosyntactic cues than children with high working memory and adults when interpreting object questions. Gaze data of both groups reveal garden-path effects and revisions for object and passive questions, which can be explained by a constraint-based account. Furthermore, children’s difficulties with object questions are related to the type of disambiguation cue. In a question elicitation task with patient-initial items, children overall prefer production of passives, whereas adults’ productions depend on the availability of disambiguation cues for the listener.

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The role of case marking and word order in cross-linguistic structural priming in late L2 acquisition

10.31234/osf.io/rkh3m ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Merel Muylle ◽

Bernolet Sarah ◽

Robert Hartsuiker

Keyword(s):

Word Order ◽

Language Variation ◽

Structural Priming ◽

Artificial Language ◽

L2 Acquisition ◽

Learning Paradigm ◽

Natural Languages ◽

Case Marking

Several studies found cross-linguistic structural priming with various language combinations. Here, we investigated the role of two important domains of language variation: case marking and word order. We varied these features in an artificial language (AL) learning paradigm, using three different AL versions in a between-subjects design. Priming was assessed between Dutch (no case marking, SVO word order) and a) a baseline version with SVO word order, b) a case marking version, and c) a version with SOV word order. Similar within- language and cross-linguistic priming was found in all versions for transitive sentences, indicating that cross-linguistic structural priming was not hindered. In contrast, for ditransitive sentences we found similar within-language priming for all versions, but no cross-linguistic priming. The finding that cross-linguistic priming is possible between languages that vary in morphological marking or word order, is compatible with studies showing cross-linguistic priming between natural languages that differ on these dimensions.

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Role of the Nondominant Hemisphere and Undamaged Area During Word Repetition in Poststroke Aphasics

Stroke ◽

10.1161/01.str.27.5.897 ◽

1996 ◽

Vol 27 (5) ◽

pp. 897-903 ◽

Cited By ~ 101

Author(s):

Masashi Ohyama ◽

Michio Senda ◽

Shin Kitamura ◽

Kenji Ishii ◽

Masahiro Mishina ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Word Repetition

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The Role of the Absolutive Object in Morphological Accessibility

Linguistic Inquiry ◽

10.1162/ling_a_00378 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 1-15

Author(s):

Rebecca Tollan

Keyword(s):

Verb Agreement

This squib discusses environments in which a subject bears ergative case in the absence of an absolutive object, contrasting syntactically ergative languages (e.g., Q’anjob’al) with languages in which the ergative argument cannot be targeted for φ-agreement (e.g., Hindi-Urdu). In these environments, the parallels between Ā-movement and verb agreement with respect to the morphological accessibility hierarchy (Bobaljik 2008, Deal 2016) break down: in the absence of an absolutive object, syntactically ergative languages allow for extraction of the ergative argument, but in absolutive-only φ-agreement languages, agreement never targets the ergative argument.

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