Uneven reassembly of tense, telicity and discourse features in L2 acquisition of the Chinese shì … de cleft construction by adult English speakers

2016 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ziyin Mai ◽  
Boping Yuan
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Study ◽  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Sentence Completion ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
L2 Acquisition ◽  
Cross Domain ◽  
Completion Task ◽  
Feature Reassembly ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Ranking Task

This article reports an empirical study investigating L2 acquisition of the Mandarin Chinese shì … de cleft construction by adult English-speaking learners within the framework of the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere, 2009). A Sentence Completion task, an interpretation task, two Acceptability Judgement tasks, and a felicity ranking task were administered to learners with intermediate and advanced Chinese proficiency ( n = 76). The results reveal an initial mapping between the target Chinese structure and the English it-cleft construction. The relevant tense, telicity and discourse features are added in an uneven feature-by-feature manner in the subsequent feature reassembly. It is proposed that feature reassembly tasks involving cross-domain operations (e.g. from prosody to syntax) are more complicated and more difficult to accomplish than those taking place within the same linguistic domain.

Feature reassembly in the acquisition of plural marking by Korean and Indonesian bilinguals

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eunji Lee ◽  
Donna Lardiere
Keyword(s):  
Judgment Task ◽  
Choice Task ◽  
Sentence Completion ◽  
L2 Acquisition ◽  
Proficiency Levels ◽  
Grammaticality Judgment ◽  
Completion Task ◽  
Classifier Languages ◽  
Feature Reassembly ◽  
Plural Marking

This bidirectional study investigated the L2 acquisition of plural marking in L2 Indonesian by native Korean speakers and in L2 Korean by native Indonesian speakers. Indonesian and Korean are classifier languages with partially overlapping restrictions on how pluralization interacts with quantification, allowing us to test the acquisition of new L2 features vs. the preemption of L1 features that are not in the L2. We also examined how the contextual complexity of new L2 features impacts development. Seventy learners at three L2 Korean proficiency levels and 40 native controls participated in Experiment 1; 61 learners at three L2 Indonesian proficiency levels and 39 native controls participated in Experiment 2. All participants completed three tasks – a Sentence Completion Task, a Grammaticality Judgment Task and a Multiple-Choice Task. Whereas learners were largely able to overcome the difficulty of preemption, they were less successful in acquiring new L2 feature contrasts in more complex conditioning environments.

The computation and suspension of presuppositions by L1-Mandarin Chinese L2-English speakers

2021 ◽  
pp. 026765832199387
Author(s):  
Shuo Feng
Keyword(s):  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
First Language ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Similar Response ◽  
Response Patterns ◽  
L2 Acquisition ◽  
Precise Understanding ◽  
L2 Learners ◽  
External Interface ◽  
Discourse Interface

The Interface Hypothesis proposes that second language (L2) learners, even at highly proficient levels, often fail to integrate information at the external interfaces where grammar interacts with other cognitive systems. While much early L2 work has focused on the syntax–discourse interface or scalar implicatures at the semantics–pragmatics interface, the present article adds to this line of research by exploring another understudied phenomenon at the semantics–pragmatics interface, namely, presuppositions. Furthermore, this study explores both inference computation and suspension via a covered-box picture-selection task. Specifically, this study investigates the interpretation of a presupposition trigger stop and stop under negation. The results from 38 native English speakers and 41 first language (L1) Mandarin Chinese learners of English indicated similar response patterns between native and L2 groups in computing presuppositions but not in suspending presuppositions. That is, L2 learners were less likely to suspend presuppositions than native speakers. This study contributes to a more precise understanding of L2 acquisition at the external interface level, as well as computation and suspension of pragmatic inferences.

scholarly journals ‘Wh-on-earth’ in Chinese speakers’ L2 English: Evidence of dormant features

2014 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 515-549 ◽  
Author(s):  
Boping Yuan
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Empirical Study ◽  
Judgment Task ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Semantic Features ◽  
L2 Acquisition ◽  
Chinese Speakers ◽  
Completion Task ◽  
Acceptability Judgment ◽  
Made In

Adopting a decompositional approach to items in the lexicon, this article reports on an empirical study investigating Chinese speakers’ second language (L2) acquisition of English wh-on-earth questions (i.e. questions with phrases like what on earth or who on earth). An acceptability judgment task, a discourse-completion task and an interpretation task were used in the study, and the results indicate that in Chinese speakers’ L2 English, the form of wh-on-earth can be learned and stored in a native-like manner, but without being endowed with fully elaborated features. A distinction between active features and dormant features in L2 lexicon is made in the analysis, and it is argued that features transferred from learners’ L1 to their L2 are likely to lose their vigour and vitality in their L2 lexicon and become dormant if there is no evidence in the target language input to confirm or disconfirm them. A typical consequence of a dormant feature is random behaviours of a related structure in L2 learners’ production and interpretation. The results of the study show that semantic features, discourse features as well as morphosyntactic features can become dormant in L2 lexicon.

scholarly journals From a simple to a complex aspectual system: Feature reassembly in L2 acquisition of Chinese imperfective markers by English speakers

2020 ◽  
pp. 026765832091143
Author(s):  
Yanyu Guo
Keyword(s):  
Judgment Task ◽  
Matching Task ◽  
Semantic Features ◽  
L2 Acquisition ◽  
Advanced Learners ◽  
Imperfective Aspect ◽  
Grammaticality Judgment ◽  
Feature Reassembly ◽  
L1 Influence ◽  
English Speaking

This article reports on an empirical study on the acquisition of Chinese imperfective markers ( zai, - zheP and - zheR) by English-speaking learners at three proficiency levels. Compared to English, Chinese has a richer imperfective aspect in terms of markers (forms) and features (meanings). Results are presented from a grammaticality judgment task, a sentence–picture matching task and a sentence completeness judgment task. We find that advanced learners are successful in reassembling additional semantic features (e.g. the [+durative] feature of zai and the [+atelic] feature of -zheP) when the first language (L1) and second language (L2) functional categories to which the to-be-added features belong are the same. However, advanced learners have problems in differentiating between the interpretations of the progressive zai and the resultant-stative - zheR, and are not sensitive to the incompleteness effect of - zheP, which indicates that discarding L1-transferred features is arduous for learners. Our findings, in general, support the predictions of the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere, 2009). In addition, there is some evidence obtained for L1 influence, which persists at an advanced stage.

L2 Acquisition of Spanish VOT by English-Speaking Immigrants in Spain

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 361-389 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy L. Face ◽  
Mandy R. Menke
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Voice Onset Time ◽  
Onset Time ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
L2 Acquisition ◽  
L2 Phonology ◽  
Long Time ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Considerable Individual Variation

AbstractPrevious studies of native English speakers learning Spanish as a second language (L2) document compromise voice onset time (VOT) values; however, the focus has been predominantly on voiceless stops and has almost exclusively investigated beginning and intermediate learners. This study fills a gap in the literature by considering the acquisition of VOT in both voiceless and voiced Spanish stops by long-time native English-speaking residents of Spain. Overall, the results show that the L2 speakers’ VOT values differ from those of native speakers across all stop consonants; yet L2 speakers’ productions of voiceless, as opposed to voiced, stops more closely approximate those of native speakers. Considerable individual variation is observed as no speaker achieves native-like performance overall, and no consonant is mastered by more than half of the speakers. Results are considered in light of what they contribute to our understanding of ultimate attainment of Spanish VOT, specifically, and L2 phonology more generally.

WH-TOPICALIZATION AT THE SYNTAX-DISCOURSE INTERFACE IN ENGLISH SPEAKERS’ L2 CHINESE GRAMMARS

2012 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 533-560 ◽  
Author(s):  
Boping Yuan ◽  
Esuna Dugarova
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Study ◽  
Noun Phrases ◽  
Background Information ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
L2 Acquisition ◽  
L2 Chinese ◽  
Discourse Interface ◽  
Syntactic Derivation ◽  
Acceptability Judgment

Although wh-words generally stay in situ in Chinese wh-questions, they can be topicalized. However, the wh-topicalization is determined at the syntax-discourse interface and has to be governed by discourse conditions; only discourse-linked (D-linked) wh-words can be topicalized, but non-D-linked ones cannot. This article reports on an empirical study that investigated English speakers’ second language (L2) acquisition of Chinese wh-topicalization. The results of an acceptability judgment test indicate that advanced English speakers are sensitive to the discourse condition that governs the syntactic derivation of wh-topicalization in Chinese, as they were found to be able to make the distinction in their L2 Chinese by allowing D-linked, but not non-D-linked, wh-elements to topicalize. However, these results also indicate that wh-determiner phrases (DPs) and wh-noun phrases (NPs) differ in their sensitivity to presupposition background information in L2 Chinese wh-topicalization, and it is argued that the availability of the deictic feature in the wh-element involved is a variable affecting the D-linking properties of wh-elements in the development of L2 Chinese wh-topicalization, and this seems more likely to be a representational deficit than a processing problem.

Verb morphology in speakers with agrammatic aphasia

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 373-403 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tina Marusch ◽  
Lena Ann Jäger ◽  
Frank Burchert ◽  
Lyndsey Nickels
Keyword(s):  
Sentence Completion ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Past Participle ◽  
Assembly Model ◽  
Verb Morphology ◽  
Completion Task ◽  
Agrammatic Aphasia ◽  
Irregular Verbs ◽  
Selection Of ◽  
Production Accuracy

Abstract This paper reports an investigation of the production of verb morphology in English speakers with agrammatic aphasia. Our main goal was to test four accounts of the processing of (ir-)regularity by quantifying regularity using affix type and the presence or absence of stem changes. Production accuracy of regular, mixed and two types of irregular past participles (irregular 1, irregular 2) was tested in English using a sentence completion task with a group of five speakers with agrammatic aphasia. The results showed significant effects on production accuracy of whether the verb required a stem change and of time reference frame but no effect of affix type: past participles that required stem changes (mixed and irregular 2 past participles) were more difficult to produce than past participles that did not change their stem (regular and irregular 1 past participles). Moreover, the production of present continuous forms was more accurate compared to past participle forms. These results suggest that a categorical conception of regular versus irregular is over-simplified, as accuracy was best predicted by stem change rather than by regularity. This is a finding most consistent with the Stem-based Assembly model. The results of this study have implications for the design and selection of stimuli in future experiments: Experimental stimuli need to be controlled for stem changes and affix type rather than assuming that irregular verbs are homogeneous.

scholarly journals Resolving ambiguous polarity stripping ellipsis structures in Persian

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vahideh Rasekhi ◽  
Jesse Harris
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Sentence Completion ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Relative Importance ◽  
English Studies ◽  
Completion Task ◽  
Direct Objects ◽  
Locality Information

Previous studies have shown that English speakers use a range of factors including locality, information structure, and semantic parallelism to interpret clausal ellipsis structures. Yet, the relative importance of each factor is currently underexplored. As cues to information structure and semantic parallelism are often implicit in English, we turned to Persian which marks information structure overtly via word order scrambling and uses the -rā morpheme to indicate definiteness/specificity on direct objects. To determine what strategies Persian speakers use to disambiguate clausal ellipsis, we conducted a naturalness rating study and sentence completion task on polarity stripping structures. Our results show that information structure and parallelism strongly influence correlate resolution in both tasks, but that a weaker preference for a local correlate emerges in scrambling in the sentence completion task. As these results diverge from those obtained in English studies, we speculate that the morphosyntactic properties of Persian constrain the strategies the processer uses in selecting a contrastive correlate and resolving ambiguity in stripping ellipsis.

Individual differences in lexical repetition priming: the combined influence of language, mood and working memory capacity.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikolas Pautz ◽  
Kevin Durrheim
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Individual Differences ◽  
Repetition Priming ◽  
Working Memory Capacity ◽  
Memory Capacity ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Primary Language ◽  
Affective States ◽  
Completion Task ◽  
Word Stem Completion

Individual differences in repetition priming is an often-overlooked area of research. The importance of this neglect becomes evident when considering the criticisms that priming research has received in the last decade concerning reliability. The current researched aimed to investigate whether individual differences in working memory capacity and affective states have differential effects on lexical-semantic repetition priming outcomes based on whether participants were first or second English speakers. Using logistic mixed-effects models to account for subject variation, the current paper investigated a three-way interaction between working memory capacity, negative affect score, and language on repetition priming outcomes. The results indicate that a statistically significant three-way interaction exists. We present an argument which posits that an individual’s primary language and subsequent familiarity with the primed concepts, in conjunction with individual differences in working memory capacity and mood, plays an important role in determining the most effective strategy used to complete a word-stem completion task.

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