scholarly journals Statistics and semantics in the acquisition of Spanish word order: Testing two accounts of the retreat from locative overgeneralization errors

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Javier Aguado-Orea ◽  
Nuria Otero ◽  
Ben Ambridge
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
High Frequency ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Low Frequency ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Point Scale ◽  
Learning Mechanisms ◽  
Spanish Word ◽  
Syntactic Differences

AbstractNative speakers of Spanish (children aged 6–7, 10–11 and adults) rated grammatical and ungrammatical ground- and figure-locative sentences with high frequency, low frequency and novel verbs (e. g., Lisallenó/forró/nupóla caja con papel; *Lisallenó/forró/nupópapel en la caja, ‘Lisa filled/lined/nupped the box with paper’; ‘Lisa filled/lined/nupped paper into the box’) using a 5-point scale. Echoing the findings of a previous English study (a language with some important syntactic differences relevant to the locative), participants rated errors as least acceptable with high frequency verbs, more acceptable with low frequency verbs, and most acceptable with novel verbs, suggesting that learners retreat from error using statistically-based learning mechanisms regardless of the target language. In support of the semantic verb class hypothesis, adults showed evidence of using the meanings assigned to novel verbs to determine the locative constructions in which they can and cannot appear. However, unlike in the previous English study, the child groups did not. We conclude that the more flexible word order exhibited by Spanish, as compared to English, may make these types of regularities more difficult to discern.

scholarly journals Investigation of Native Speaker and Second Language Learner Intuition of Collocation Frequency

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Siyanova ◽  
S Spina
Keyword(s):  
Language Learning ◽  
High Frequency ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
Low Frequency ◽  
Language Learner ◽  
Very Low Frequency ◽  
Second Language Learner ◽  
L2 Learners ◽  
L1 And L2

© 2015 Language Learning Research Club, University of Michigan. Research into frequency intuition has focused primarily on native (L1) and, to a lesser degree, nonnative (L2) speaker intuitions about single word frequency. What remains a largely unexplored area is L1 and L2 intuitions about collocation (i.e., phrasal) frequency. To bridge this gap, the present study aimed to answer the following question: How do L2 learners and native speakers compare against each other and corpora in their subjective judgments of collocation frequency? Native speakers and learners of Italian were asked to judge 80 noun-adjective pairings as one of the following: high frequency, medium frequency, low frequency, very low frequency. Both L1 and L2 intuitions of high frequency collocations correlated strongly with corpus frequency. Neither of the two groups of participants exhibited accurate intuitions of medium and low frequency collocations. With regard to very low frequency pairings, L1 but not L2 intuitions were found to correlate with corpora for the majority of the items. Further, mixed-effects modeling revealed that L2 learners were comparable to native speakers in their judgments of the four frequency bands, although some differences did emerge. Taken together, the study provides new insights into the nature of L1 and L2 intuitions about phrasal frequency.

Processing of inflected nouns in late bilinguals

2007 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARJA PORTIN ◽  
MINNA LEHTONEN ◽  
MATTI LAINE
Keyword(s):  
Language Proficiency ◽  
High Frequency ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Reaction Times ◽  
Low Frequency ◽  
Error Rates ◽  
Decision Task ◽  
Full Form ◽  
Late Exposure ◽  
Complex Words

This study investigated the recognition of Swedish inflected nouns in two participant groups. Both groups were Finnish-speaking late learners of Swedish, but the groups differed in regard to their Swedish language proficiency. In a visual lexical decision task, inflected Swedish nouns from three frequency ranges were contrasted with corresponding monomorphemic nouns. The reaction times and error rates suggested morphological decomposition for low-frequency inflected words. Yet, both medium- and high-frequency inflected words appeared to possess full-form representations. Despite an overall advantage for the more proficient participants, this pattern was present in both groups. The results indicate that even late exposure to a language can yield such input representations for morphologically complex words that are typical of native speakers.

Sentence matching and processing in L2 development

1993 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 253-280 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynn Eubank
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Work ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Response Times ◽  
Target Language ◽  
German Word ◽  
Processing Strategies ◽  
L2 Development ◽  
Sentence Matching ◽  
Surprising Finding

The processing strategies described in Clahsen (1984) to explain the develop ment of German word order make predictions that can be tested ex perimentally. Clahsen's Initialization/Finalization Strategy (IFS) in particular predicts that uninverted, ADV-SVO sentences will exact less cost in terms of processing than inverted, ADV-VSO sentences, even though inverted sent ences are grammatical in the target language and uninverted sentences are ungrammatical. The experimental means employed to test this prediction is the Sentence Matching (SM) procedure described originally in Freedman and Forster (1985). In the SM procedure, response times are elicited for particular types of sentences by measuring the time (in msec.) it takes for subjects to determine whether two sentences presented by computer are identical or different. The results of one of the experiments reported here show that inverted sentences result in significantly shorter response times than uninverted sentences for non-native speakers. This finding directly contradicts the IFS-derived prediction. However, further experimental work reported here indicates that native speakers do not respond at all to the inverted-uninverted contrast. The rest of the article thus seeks to explain this somewhat surprising finding. The proposed explanation also suggests that natives and non-natives may process sentences in the SM task in rather different ways.

Lexical and discourse factors in the second language acquisition of Spanish word order

2003 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 273-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tammy Jandrey Hertel
Keyword(s):  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Order Effects ◽  
Advanced Learners ◽  
Spanish Word ◽  
Native Speakers Of English ◽  
Beginning Learners

This study investigates the acquisition of Spanish word order by native speakers of English. Specifically, it considers the development of sensitivity to the distinct interpretations of subject-verb (SV) vs. verb-subject (VS) order, as determined by lexical verb class (unaccusative and unergative verbs) and discourse structure.Participants included a native speaker control group and learners at four proficiency levels. Results from a contextualized production task indicate that beginning learners transferred the SV order of English for all structures. Intermediate learners showed a gradual increase in the production of lexically and discourse-determined inversion, although their data was also characterized by indeterminacy and variability. The advanced learners demonstrated a sensitivity to the word order effects of unaccusativity and discourse factors, but also tended to overgeneralize inversion to unergative verbs in a neutral discourse context.

scholarly journals Levels of Affixation in the Acquisition of English Morphology: A Review of Selected Paper

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 68-72
Author(s):  
Sikin Nuratika ◽  
Nilam Cahaya Fitri Yanti ◽  
Ester Mayer
Keyword(s):  
Language Development ◽  
Lexical Decision ◽  
High Frequency ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Low Frequency ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Level 3 ◽  
Native Speakers Of English ◽  
Level 1 ◽  
Level 2

In considering word formation in language development, there appear to be two central issues which can broadly be characterized as questions relating to (i) productivity, and (ii) constraints. This paper reviews one of the renowned articles which involving the theory of level-ordering that has three levels  within the lexicon, children, recognize high-frequency words than low-frequency words written by Peter Gordon (1989), entitled "Levels of Affixation in the Acquisition of English Morphology." This study has three untimed lexical-decision experiments which were carried out with 5- through 9-year-olds of native speakers of English and found general support for a systematic relation between productivity and level assignment. The aim of this paper is to make sure the readers would understand what the article's researcher try to explain about the word-formation such as stem, the stem which add affixes of Level 1, stem which adds affixes of Level 2, and stem which add affixes of Level 3. Moreover, this article's references are accurate (valid) and well-argued. This article is highly recommended for word formation in language development because the researcher stated that children might have a significant part in this process. Therefore, this paper seen the word-formation will be rich in language development depends on how often people actively create words, for example, by combining stems and affixes in much the same way that they generate sentences.

scholarly journals Syntactic Aspects of Lithuanian-Spanish Translation of Fiction and Scientific Texts

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-146
Author(s):  
Carmen Caro Dugo
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Direct Object ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Specific Context ◽  
Spanish Translation ◽  
Scientific Texts ◽  
Spanish Word ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Linguistic Means

Summary Translators, linguists and translation researchers often have to deal with subtle and sometimes complex syntactical aspects involved in translation. Properly conveying the structure and rhythm of a sentence or text in another language is a difficult task that requires a good understanding of syntactical aspects of both the source and the target language. The morphology of Lithuanian verbs and nouns, and specially its system of declensions and cases, without any doubt facilitates a relatively flexible word order. Many linguists also agree that word order in the Spanish sentence is also freer than in French, English or other modern languages. It has often been said that Spanish has the most flexible word order of all Romance languages. However, Spanish word order is by no means as free as in Lithuanian. A comparative study of Lithuanian texts and their translation into Spanish allows a better understanding of the syntactical differences between both languages. This article examines a case of syntactical inversion in Lithuanian: the displacement of the direct object and its location at the beginning of the sentence, and the translation of such sentences into Spanish. In Spanish the direct object usually follows the verb, except in the cases when that function is carried out by pronouns. In order to displace a direct object to the beginning of the sentence, Spanish syntactical structures should be used. In this article two stylistically different Lithuanian texts will be compared with their Spanish translation so as to identify the linguistic means used in each case. A comparative analysis of different types of texts is useful to reveal the Spanish syntactical structures chosen by the translators as well as certain tendencies in each specific context.

scholarly journals Investigation of Native Speaker and Second Language Learner Intuition of Collocation Frequency

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Siyanova ◽  
S Spina
Keyword(s):  
Language Learning ◽  
High Frequency ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
Low Frequency ◽  
Language Learner ◽  
Very Low Frequency ◽  
Second Language Learner ◽  
L2 Learners ◽  
L1 And L2

© 2015 Language Learning Research Club, University of Michigan. Research into frequency intuition has focused primarily on native (L1) and, to a lesser degree, nonnative (L2) speaker intuitions about single word frequency. What remains a largely unexplored area is L1 and L2 intuitions about collocation (i.e., phrasal) frequency. To bridge this gap, the present study aimed to answer the following question: How do L2 learners and native speakers compare against each other and corpora in their subjective judgments of collocation frequency? Native speakers and learners of Italian were asked to judge 80 noun-adjective pairings as one of the following: high frequency, medium frequency, low frequency, very low frequency. Both L1 and L2 intuitions of high frequency collocations correlated strongly with corpus frequency. Neither of the two groups of participants exhibited accurate intuitions of medium and low frequency collocations. With regard to very low frequency pairings, L1 but not L2 intuitions were found to correlate with corpora for the majority of the items. Further, mixed-effects modeling revealed that L2 learners were comparable to native speakers in their judgments of the four frequency bands, although some differences did emerge. Taken together, the study provides new insights into the nature of L1 and L2 intuitions about phrasal frequency.

scholarly journals Zur Aussprache niederländischsprachiger Familiennamen aus dem Bereich des Sports durch polnische Muttersprachler – theoretische Grundlagen und exemplarische Analysen

2021 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 179-193
Author(s):  
Artur Tworek
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
High Frequency ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Speech Sounds ◽  
Research Results ◽  
The Real ◽  
Communication Models ◽  
Research Material

The aim of the following article is to analyze the pronunciation of Dutch surnames by Polish native speakers. The research material consists of journalistic statements from the communicative-semantic area of sport that are present in public audiovisual mass media. The selected material guarantees the high frequency of its production and the associated perception within the real acts of communication. In particular, the examination includes Dutch sounds which either do not exist in Polish or occur in a different graphical-distributional context. The exemplary research results (the mode of phonetic integration of foreign speech sounds) represent mechanisms that are interpreted in relation to typical communication models. The study also analyzes the potential placement of such phonetic forms in the target language, i.e. Polish.

Chinese idioms as constructions

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 558-592
Author(s):  
Te-hsin Liu ◽  
Lily I-Wen Su
Keyword(s):  
Reading Comprehension ◽  
Cognitive Processing ◽  
High Frequency ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Low Frequency ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
L2 Learners ◽  
Underlying Mechanisms ◽  
Chinese Idioms ◽  
Idiom Processing

Abstract Chinese Quadrisyllabic Idiomatic Expressions (henceforth QIEs) are highly productive in the modern language. They can be used to understand the cognitive processing of structure and meaning during reading comprehension, as in the patterning of [qian-A-wan-B] ‘1k-A-10k-B’ (e.g. one-thousand army ten-thousand horse). However, little is known about the underlying mechanisms of QIEs during reading comprehension. Adopting the framework of Construction Grammar, in the present study, we aimed to study the convergence and divergence between native speakers and L2 learners in the processing of Chinese idiomatic constructions. In the present study, twenty-three native university-level Mandarin speakers and twenty-three L2 learners of intermediate and advanced levels of Mandarin, all speakers of the non Sinosphere, participated in the experiment, and were instructed to make a semantic congruency judgment during the presentation of a QIE. Our results showed that, for both native speakers and L2 learners, semantically transparent idiomatic constructions elicited much shorter RTs than semantically opaque idiomatic constructions. Our behavioral results also showed that native speakers processed low frequency QIEs faster than high frequency ones, implying semantic satiation to impede the interpretation of high frequency idioms. For L2 learners, it was semantic transparency, rather than frequency, that played a more prominent role in idiom processing.

Transcription, vowel and consonant systems of Upper Bavarian dialect

1979 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-14
Author(s):  
C. E. Capell
Keyword(s):  
German Text ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
The North ◽  
North Wind ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Syntactic Differences

Informants recorded a version of ‘The North Wind and the Sun’, adapted from the North German Variety in the I.P.A. Principles (1973). The German text was rewritten with considerable emphasis on lexical differences, and only slightly less emphasis on morphological and syntactic differences, especially word order. Words such as Wanderer in High German (hereinafter H.G.) were regarded as ‘non-Bavarian’ by native speakers and virtually all examples of the imperfect tense were changed to the perfect tense. It is usual in this dialect, which is normally known as Upper Bavarian (hereinafter U.B.), for personal pronouns to follow verb forms, as a result of which they are very rarely stressed.

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