Representational and Computational Changes in Heritage Language Grammars

The notion of complexity has been applied to descriptions and comparisons of languages and to explanations related to ease and difficulty of various linguistic phenomena in first and second language acquisition. It has been noted that compared to baseline grammars, heritage language grammars are less complex, displaying morphological simplification and structural shrinking, especially among heritage speakers with lower proficiency in the language. On some recent proposals of gender agreement in Spanish and Norwegian (Fuchs et al., 2015; Lohndal & Putnam, 2020), these differences are representational, affecting the projection of functional categories and feature specifications in the syntax. An alternative possibility is that differences between baseline and heritage grammars arise from computational considerations related to bilingualism, affecting speed of lexical access and feature reassembly online in the minority language. We illustrate this proposal with empirical data from gender agreement and differential object marking. Although presented as alternatives, the representational and computational explanations are not incompatible, and may both be adequate to capture varying levels of variability modulated by linguistic proficiency. These proposals formalize bilingual acquisition models of grammar competition and directly relate the availability and type of input (the acquisition evidence) to the locus and nature of the grammatical differences between heritage and baseline grammars.

Pronominal Feature Re-assembly: L1 and L2 Pronoun Resolution of Spanish Epicene and Common Gender Antecedents

In this paper, we propose the implementation of a full-fledged feature-based lexicalist syntactic theory as a way to represent the possible configurations of features in the learner’s interlanguage and formalize a theory of acquisition based in feature reassembly. We describe gender agreement pronominal coindexation in Spanish using Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) and use it to analyze the results of a self-paced reading test with L1 and L2 speakers. We find that the specification of the gender feature value at the syntactic level in epicene antecedents facilitates pronominal resolution in L1 Spanish speakers. Conversely, there is a cognitive cost when the gender feature is underspecified at the syntactic level in common gender antecedents; this cost is not found among L2 speakers. The detailed descriptions in terms of feature specification in the HPSG framework allow us to observe differences between the L1 and L2 grammars in fine-grained detail and represent optionality at the lexical level.

Feature Matching Does Not Equal Convergence: Acquisition of L2 French Accusative Pronouns by L1 Spanish Speakers

Our study aims to determine whether formal similarity between two languages (operationalized via the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis) allows adult L2 learners of French (Spanish native speakers; NSs) to straightforwardly acquire third-person singular accusative clitics in their L2. Additionally, we examined the role of surface similarity, since French and Spanish overlap and diverge in several ways. In terms of formal similarity, third-person accusative clitic pronouns in Spanish are almost perfect analogues of their French counterparts. In terms of surface similarity, however, while the feminine accusative pronouns are identical (“la” [la]), the masculine ones differ in Spanish (“lo” [lo]) and French (“le” [lǝ]). Participants included French NSs (n = 26) and Spanish-speaking L2 French learners (n = 36). Results from an offline forced-choice picture selection task and an online self-paced reading task did not support the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis because learners showed considerable difficulty with the interpretation and processing of these pronouns, revealing that, unlike French NSs, their interpretations and processing are guided by the feature [±Human] and, to a lesser degree, by gender, which might be due to the surface-level similarity between feminine accusative clitic pronouns in both languages.

Scale-Sensitive Feature Reassembly Network for Pedestrian Detection

Serious scale variation is a key challenge in pedestrian detection. Most works typically employ a feature pyramid network to detect objects at diverse scales. Such a method suffers from information loss during channel unification. Inadequate sampling of the backbone network also affects the power of pyramidal features. Moreover, an arbitrary RoI (region of interest) allocation scheme of these detectors incurs coarse RoI representation, which becomes worse under the dilemma of small pedestrian relative scale (PRS). In this paper, we propose a novel scale-sensitive feature reassembly network (SSNet) for pedestrian detection in road scenes. Specifically, a multi-parallel branch sampling module is devised with flexible receptive fields and an adjustable anchor stride to improve the sensitivity to pedestrians imaged at multiple scales. Meanwhile, a context enhancement fusion module is also proposed to alleviate information loss by injecting various spatial context information into the original features. For more accurate prediction, an adaptive reassembly strategy is designed to obtain recognizable RoI features in the proposal refinement stage. Extensive experiments are conducted on CityPersons and Caltech datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The detection results show that our SSNet surpasses the baseline method significantly by integrating lightweight modules and achieves competitive performance with other methods without bells and whistles.

Roles of positive and indirect negative evidence in L2 feature reassembly

This article reports an empirical study investigating L2 acquisition of the Mandarin Chinese collective marker -men by adult Thai-speaking learners and the Thai collective marker phûak- by adult Chinese-speaking learners within the framework of the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere, 2009a, 2009b). An acceptability judgment test was administered to learners with beginning, intermediate and advanced proficiencies of Chinese and Thai (n = 114) as well as native speaker controls (n = 30). The results reveal a facilitating role of positive evidence in L2 feature reassembly as Chinese learners who are exposed to positive evidence of “phûak + animal noun” and “phûak + indefinite noun” structures in their Thai input perform native-like on these structures from an intermediate level onward. On the other hand, feature reassembly is hindered when positive evidence is unavailable as in the case of Thai learners of Chinese where no evidence they receive in the input shows ungrammaticality of “animal noun + men” and “indefinite noun + men” structures in Chinese. These learners mostly fail to perform native-like even at an advanced level.

The acquisition of English articles among L1 Dagbani L2 English learners

This study investigates the acquisition of articles in L2 English by L1 speakers of Dagbani, a Gur language spoken in Ghana. Dagbani differs from English in that it has two definite articles, no indefinite article, and a zero-article which may express definiteness, indefiniteness as well as genericity. The study consisted of a Forced-choice task (FCT) and an Acceptability judgement task (AJT) which were administered to Dagbani teenagers with an intermediate proficiency in English (n = 45) and a group of native English speakers as controls (n = 8). The results showed that the learners’ article choice was based on definiteness, not specificity (i.e., no fluctuation between the two) and that they had slightly more problems with indefinite than definite contexts, while generic contexts were the most problematic. Except for a certain task effect as well as a possible interference of instruction (in the FCT), the results can be argued to generally be due to influence from the L1 and to the difficulty of feature reassembly.

Second Language Acquisition of Quantifiers by Arabic Speakers of English: Feature Reassembly Approach

This paper reports on an experimental study addressing second language acquisition of English quantifiers by Arabic speakers. Due to several differences found between Arabic and English regarding types, meanings and functions of quantifiers, Arabic learners encounter challenges in mastering them properly. Unlike English, Arabic does not make lots of distinctions among the different meanings that each quantifier might bear; using the same quantifier to bear two or several meanings at the same time. Arabic, for instance, does not differentiate between countable and non-countable nouns using the same modifier in contrast to English. According to the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere 2005, 2009; Choi & Lardiere, 2006), second language (L2) speakers must successfully reassemble existing features of their first language (L1) into the L2 feature-based sets in order to accommodate the L2 grammar. The researcher tests the validity of this prediction for the L2 acquisition of English quantifiers, which requires Arabic learners of English to remap semantic concepts of quantity onto new and different morpholexical configurations. Data from 40 L1 Arabic learners of English at different levels of proficiency and 20 native speakers who completed a picture/sentence matching task suggest that only the meanings which require different and new semantics-morphology remapping is difficult.

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

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.

The Acquisition of Definiteness and Specificity in English: A Case Study with Saudi-Arabic Learners of English Using an Online Task

Definiteness with Arabic learners has been explored by many researchers such as Jaensch and Sarko (2009) and Sarko (2009). The majority of previous studies have used an offline task and focused on identifying the types of errors which learners were committing. Conversely, the present study will use an online reaction time task to investigate the learners’ accuracy in judging [±definite and ±specific] in a series of sentences. The aim of the study is to ascertain the accuracy of participants in judging grammatical and ungrammatical sentences in terms of definiteness and specificity in English, and also to identify which factors have the greatest effect on this accuracy. The study will examine the process of article acquisition from the perspective of universal grammar using the following hypotheses: The Representational Deficit hypothesis (RDH) by Hawkins and Chan (1997), the Feature Reassembly hypothesis by Lardiere (2009) and the bottleneck hypothesis by Slabakova (2008, 2009, 2015). Thirty-two Saudi learners have completed a grammatical judgment task that was designed using OpenSesame to incorporate a reaction time test along with two vocabulary tests (Yes/No and Lex30) and a proficiency test. The results showed no effect on definiteness and specificity with the Saudi-Arabic learners. Moreover, the findings demonstrated that there is no difference in reaction time which could be attributed to [±definite and ±specific]. Receptive vocabulary knowledge and proficiency affected the learners’ accuracy in judging article use in English, but no such effect was found for the learners’ productive vocabulary knowledge. Additionally, L1 negative transfer has been observed in Saudi-Arabic learners of English particularly with low-level learners.