Talking about oneself

Second language instructors often have students talk about their own experiences rather than abstract impersonal topics. Intuitively, such topics seem more likely to encourage student engagement. Unfortunately, virtually no empirical research has examined the effects of personal prompts on spoken output. To address this gap in research, the current study (N = 117) compares the spoken output of Japanese university English students who responded to a personal prompt with students responding to an impersonal prompt. Output was recorded in transcripts and then analyzed using a battery of measures related to complexity, accuracy, and fluency. Findings showed that personalized prompts were associated with greater fluency. Moreover, there was some evidence that impersonal prompts led to output with greater lexical complexity. Rates of accuracy were similar in both groups. Correlational analysis suggested that lexical sophistication was associated with reduced fluency. The conclusion addresses practical implications and avenues for further research.

What do (most of) our dispersion measures measure (most)? Dispersion?

This paper discusses the degree to which most of the most widely-used measures of dispersion in corpus linguistics are not particularly valid in the sense of actually measuring dispersion rather than some amalgam of a lot of frequency and a little dispersion. The paper demonstrates these issues on the basis of data from a variety of corpora. I then outline how to design a dispersion measure that only measures dispersion and show that (i) it indeed measures information that is different from frequency in an intuitive way and (ii) has a higher degree of predictive power of lexical decision times from the MALD database than nearly all other measures in nearly all corpora tested.

What do (some of) our association measures measure (most)? Association?

This paper discusses the degree to which some of the most widely-used measures of association in corpus linguistics are not particularly valid in the sense of actually measuring association rather than some amalgam of a lot of frequency and a little association. The paper demonstrates these issues on the basis of hypothetical and actual corpus data and outlines implications of the findings. I then outline how to design an association measure that only measures association and show that its behavior supports the use of the log odds ratio as a true association-only measure but separately from frequency; in addition, this paper sets the stage for an analogous review of dispersion measures in corpus linguistics.

Explicit versus non-explicit prosodic training in the learning of Spanish L2 stress contrasts by French listeners

Different methods to acquire a language can contribute differently to learning success. In the present study we tested the success of L2 stress contrasts acquisition, when ab initio learners were taught or not about the theoretic nature of L2 stress contrasts. In two 4-hour perceptual training methods, French-speaking listeners received either (a) explicit instructions about Spanish stress patterns and perception activities commonly used in L2 pronunciation courses or (b) no explicit instructions and a unique perception activity, a shape/word matching task. Results showed that French-speaking listeners improved their ability to identify and discriminate stress contrasts in Spanish after training. However, there was no significant difference between explicit and non-explicit training nor was there an effect on stress processing under different phonetic variability conditions. This suggests that in L2 stress acquisition, non-explicit training may benefit ab initio learners as much as explicit instruction and activities used in L2 pronunciation courses.

Bilingual lexical representation

This paper has two aims: (1) to examine evidence for noncognate translation priming from cross-language masked priming studies of printed words. (2) to introduce an automatic procedure for creating masked speech priming experiments. For (1) we conducted two meta-analyses that aggregated evidence from masked translation priming studies in the L1 to L2 and L2 to L1 prime-target directions. These showed that there was evidence of significant priming for both directions, and that priming was larger for the L1-L2 direction. The analyses revealed considerable heterogeneity in outcomes, particularly for priming in the L1 to L2 direction. For (2) we outlined some of the practical difficulties that are involved in implementing a masked speech priming experiment and offered a largely automated solution (that we will make available).1 We then briefly considered whether the work with written primes and targets may translate to the spoken medium.

The impact of one’s response to the teacher’s feedback on the same person’s and the partner’s learning in paired writing

The present study investigated the relationship between one dyad member’s revision in response to written corrective feedback (CF) and the same person’s learning and the other dyad member’s learning during collaborative writing. Twenty-eight English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) students at an American university were paired up and collaborated on two animation description tasks in Google Docs while receiving the researcher’s written CF on their errors on the indefinite and definite articles. Learners worked individually on an animation description task one week prior to the written CF treatment (pretest), immediately after the treatment (posttest), and two weeks after (delayed posttest). When pretest score and CF frequency were controlled for, the number of one’s revisions was not related to the same person’s or the partner’s posttest score. However, the number of one’s revisions was significantly positively related to the same learner’s delayed posttest score, but not to the partner’s delayed posttest score.

Of revistas and magacínes

The transfer of words from one language to another is ubiquitous in many of the world’s languages. While loanwords have a rich literature in the fields of historical linguistics, language contact, and sociolinguistics, little work has been done examining how loanwords are processed by bilinguals with knowledge of both the source and recipient languages. The present study uses pupillometry to compare the online processing of established loanwords in Puerto Rican Spanish to native Spanish words by highly proficient Puerto Rican Spanish-English bilinguals. Established loanwords elicited a significantly larger pupillary response than native Spanish words, with the pupillary response modulated by both the frequency of the loanword itself and of the native Spanish counterpart. These findings suggest that established loanwords are processed differently than native Spanish words and compete with their native equivalents, potentially due to both intra- and inter-lingual effects of saliency.

Relative clause processing in L1 and L2 English

This study investigates the locus of processing difficulty in English object-extracted relative clauses during both native and non-native sentence comprehension. Two L-maze experiments were conducted – one with English native speakers (n = 48) and another with highly proficient Chinese learners of English (n = 20) – to compare the processing of object-extracted relative clauses (ORCs) with that of subject-extracted relative clauses (SRCs). Both participants groups revealed clear processing costs for ORC sentences. In both cases, this processing difficulty was localized at the beginning of the ORC, and specifically at the article that introduced the ORC subject (The soldier who the sailor roughly pushed….). These findings are taken to indicate that structural expectations play a central role in the first- and second-language processing of English relative clauses and of complex sentences more generally.