Epistemic reasoning in pragmatic inferencing by non-native speakers: The case of scalar implicatures

Scalar implicatures involve inferring the use of a less informative term (e.g. some) to mean the negation of a more informative term (e.g. not all). A growing body of recent research on the derivation of scalar implicatures by adult second language (L2) learners shows that while they are successful in acquiring the knowledge of scalar implicatures, a property at the semantics–pragmatics interface, it remains controversial as to which mechanism, default or non-default, could account for L2 learners’ derivation of scalar implicatures. The present study used an online self-paced reading task to address this issue by examining the role of the speaker’s knowledge state in the interpretation of the existential quantifier some by Chinese-speaking learners of English in incremental sentence processing. Results showed that both L2 and native participants demonstrated comparable online sensitivity to the speaker’s knowledge state. Critically, when the scalar implicature was computed in situations where the speaker was more likely to know whether the statement with the stronger alternative was true, it gave rise to measurable reading latency, indicative of increased processing costs. We conclude by arguing that our findings are compatible with the context-driven models within the Gricean tradition.

A lexical semantic approach to the L2 acquisition of Spanish psych verbs

This study builds on prior research on second language (L2) Spanish psych verbs, which has centered on morphosyntactic properties, by examining their syntactic distribution, which relies on lexical semantic knowledge. The fact that certain forms are licensed for some verbs, but not others, is the result of an underlying lexical semantic difference across verb classes, represented here as a difference in formal feature strength. To fully acquire the relevant grammatical distribution, L2 learners must successfully acquire (i) licensing restrictions on argument structure and (ii) underlying lexical semantic representations of individual verbs. Three groups of L2 learners ( n = 66) and a group of native Spanish speakers ( n = 19) completed two judgment tasks (one with aural stimuli and one with written stimuli) which presented object experiencer psych verbs in multiple argument structures. Results show that advanced L2 learners are largely sensitive to the distribution tested here; however, while they have acquired relevant licensing restrictions, they may associate fixed feature settings with verbs that allow variable feature settings. These results are consistent with predictions made by the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis and highlight the role of lexical semantic features in second language acquisition.

Production of English lexical stress by Mandarin speakers: Acoustics and kinematics

This study aims to understand if Mandarin late learners of English can successfully manipulate acoustic and kinematic cues to deliver English stress contrast in production. Mandarin ( N = 8) and English ( N = 8) speakers were recorded producing English trochaic (initial stress) and iambic (final stress) items during a nonword repetition task. Speakers’ jaw movement for the utterances was tracked and analysed. Acoustic and kinematic cues were measured for each syllable, including acoustic duration, fundamental frequency (F0), and intensity, as well as jaw movement duration, displacement, peak velocity, and stiffness. Stress ratios (syllable 1 / syllable 2) were calculated for each cue and compared between groups. Results showed that English and Mandarin speakers had generally comparable performance in differentiating trochaic from iambic patterns, as well as in the degree of between-syllable contrast within each pattern. Between-group differences were only observed in acoustic duration and jaw movement velocity/stiffness. These results suggest that the experience with Mandarin stress contributes to Mandarin speakers’ overall successful production of English stress but also results in nonnative use of some acoustic/kinematic cues.

Development of production skills in the absence of precise phonolexical representations

The study investigates the relationship between lexical encoding and production in order to establish whether learners are able to produce a difficult contrast in words that they merged in their mental lexicon. Forty American English learners of Russian were tested on their production and lexical encoding of familiar and highly-frequent words with the plain/palatalized contrast in second language (L2) Russian. Results suggest that the relationship between phonolexical encoding and production is less straightforward than a simple mirror image and is strongly affected by the prosodic position of the target consonants. In word-final position, learners did not lexically encode the difference between plain and palatalized consonants but they strived to produce it, although not very successfully. In intervocalic position, learners’ ability to encode and produce words with the plain/palatalized contrast was more accurate than in word-final position, which was attributed to the ‘spelling trap’ effect. Since Russian orthography employs vowel graphemes to mark the plain/palatalized status of preceding consonants, it appears that learners relied on these assumed vowel differences to articulate complex palatalization gestures. Thus, the findings of this study suggest that L2 learners can produce a contrast that they have not yet lexically encoded.

Existence and consequences of dormant features: Evidence from L2 acquisition of Chinese object ellipsis

The current study investigates second language acquisition of Chinese object ellipsis to probe the development of features transferred from learners’ native language without robust confirming or disconfirming evidence in the second language (L2) input. It is argued that Chinese allows object ellipsis licensed by a verb with a [VCase] feature but not by a verb with a [Vnon-Case] feature. In contrast, Korean allows object ellipsis to be licensed by both types of verbs, whilst English prohibits both. An acceptability judgement task was conducted among first language (L1) English and L1 Korean L2 Chinese learners from elementary to advanced levels, with the results showing that the [Vnon-Case] feature was assembled in the Chinese grammars of English and Korean elementary L2 learners; however, it gradually lost its vigour and licensing power for object ellipsis in intermediate L2 grammars and was successfully removed from licensing object ellipsis in advanced L2 grammars. These findings support predictions by Yuan regarding a feature’s dormant status and modify Yuan’s predictions regarding a dormant feature’s consequences.

Phonological redeployment and the mapping problem: Cross-linguistic E-similarity is the beginning of the story, not the end

In this research note I want to address some misunderstandings about the construct of redeployment and suggest that we need to fit these behavioural data from Yang, Chen and Xiao (YCX) into a broader context. I will suggest that these authors’ work is not just about the failure of three models to predict equivalence classification. Equivalence classification is not the end of the story but only the beginning. We need to look at what cues are detected in the input, which subset of the input becomes intake, and how this intake is parsed onto phonological structures. The empirical results of YCX should not be viewed as some sort of non-result inasmuch as none of the proposed predictors of Mandarin equivalence classification foresaw that the Russian prevoiced stops and short-lag stops would be equated with the Mandarin short-lag stops. Rather, the empirical results need to be contextualized by considering such factors as cue reweighting as part of the learning theory which maps intake onto phonological representations. In this light, the results are not a repudiation of phonological redeployment, but help to shed light on the parsing of the acoustic signal, the importance of robust burst-release cues, and the non-local nature of L2 phonological learning (as opposed to noticing).

Similarity-based interference and relative clauses in second language processing

Relative clauses have long been examined in research on first (L1) and second (L2) language acquisition and processing, and a large body of research has shown that object relative clauses (e.g. ‘The boy that the girl saw’) are more difficult to process than subject relative clauses (e.g. ‘The boy that saw the girl’). Although there are different accounts of this finding, memory-based factors have been argued to play a role in explaining the object relative disadvantage. Evidence of memory-based factors in relative clause processing comes from studies indicating that representational similarity influences the difficulty associated with object relatives as a result of a phenomenon known as similarity-based interference. Although similarity-based interference has been well studied in L1 processing, less is known about how it influences L2 processing. We report two studies – an eye-tracking experiment and a comprehension task – investigating interference in the comprehension of relative clauses in L1 and L2 readers. Our results indicated similarity-based interference in the processing of object relative clauses in both L1 and L2 readers, with no significant differences in the size of interference effects between the two groups. These results highlight the importance of considering memory-based factors when examining L2 processing.

The interactional ecology of homestay experiences: Locating input within participation and membership

Study abroad homestays are generally assumed to provide visitors with opportunities to learn language ‘in the wild’ by participating in the host family’s everyday life. Ultimately such participation is accomplished via individual episodes of interaction as the visitor is socialized into the family’s mundane routines and rituals. Building on research into second language interaction in the lifeworlds of learners beyond the classroom, this study considers (1) how interactants in one homestay context draw on a range of ecologically available resources to co-accomplish participation and membership, and (2) how such participation affords the guest with an expanding repertoire of resources, including linguistic elements and new participatory practices. The study uses multimodal conversation analysis (CA) to discuss two extended extracts from naturally occurring interaction collected between a novice L2 English speaker and his homestay family. The analysis suggests that language learning is more complex than the mere provision of linguistic input: new lexical items and practices emerge within the interactants’ respective lifeworlds in relation to locally situated contingencies, and can be occasioned and explained via recourse to a range of material and embodied affordances beyond just language. Input, therefore, is sequentially and ecologically located in the broader business of an ongoing collective sociality and primarily serves the two key interactional imperatives of progressivity and intersubjectivity.

Morphological generalization in heritage speakers: The Turkish aorist

Heritage speakers (HS) have been shown to experience difficulties with inflectional morphology (particularly with irregular morphology) and to frequently overapply regular morphology. The present study seeks to get further insight into the inflectional processes of HS by investigating how these are generalized to nonce words in language production, the first study of this kind for heritage Turkish. We specifically examined morphological generalization processes in the Turkish aorist which – unusual for this language – includes both regular and irregular forms. A written elicited-production experiment containing nonce verbs with varying degrees of similarity to existing verbs was administered to Turkish HS and native monolingually-raised Turkish speakers (MS). We also explored how well a formal model that was trained on a large lexical corpus of Turkish matches the human speakers’ performance. Our main finding is that HS employ both similarity-based and rule-based mechanisms for morphological generalization of the Turkish aorist, with subtle differences to the way these mechanisms are applied by Turkish MS.

Different effects of L1 and L2 phonology on L3 lexical learning: An ERP study

This study investigated the influence of phonological word representations from both first language (L1) and second language (L2) on third language (L3) lexical learning in L1-dominant Spanish–English bilinguals. More specifically, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to determine whether L1 Spanish and L2 English phonology modulates bilinguals’ brain response to newly learned L3 Slovak words, some of which had substantial phonological overlap with either L1 or L2 words (interlingual homophones) in comparison to matched control words with little or no phonological overlap. ERPs were recorded from a group of 20 Spanish–English bilinguals in response to 120 auditory Slovak words, both before and after a three-day-long learning period during which they associated the L3 Slovak novel words with their L1 Spanish translations. Behaviorally, both L1 Spanish and L2 English homophony facilitated the learning of L3 Slovak words in a similar manner. In contrast, the electrophysiological results of the post-training ERPs, but not the pre-training ERPs, showed an N100 effect for L2 English interlingual homophones and opposite N400 effects for L1 Spanish and L2 English interlingual homophones in comparison to control words. These findings suggest different neurocognitive mechanisms in the use of L1 and L2 phonological information when learning novel words in an L3.