EUROSLA Yearbook - Volume 15, Issue 1, 2015

This study investigates reference management of two groups of 8–12 year old Greek–German bilinguals, resident in Greece (Bilinguals_GR N = 38) and in Germany (Bilinguals_GE N = 39). We analyze the bilinguals’ retellings in each language and compare them with data from two monolingual control groups of Greek and German children (Monolinguals_GR and Monolinguals_GE, N = 20 respectively). We seek to establish how the use of referential forms in character introduction, maintenance and reintroduction in the bilinguals’ narrative retellings is affected by language dominance and whether proficiency in each language patterns similarly with respect to dominance in input. Our results indicate that differences in choice of referential form can be attributed to language dominance. Bilingual production of referential expressions differed from that of monolinguals when exposure to one language outweighed the other, as in the case of Bilinguals_GE. Similarly, proficiency in terms of vocabulary, verb diversity and syntactic complexity was affected in the weaker language for this group, which showed a strong dominance in German input. When exposure was more balanced (Bilinguals_GR), proficiency measures in both languages were affected, but to a lesser degree.

The development of clause linkage in a second language has been studied extensively in the fields of applied linguistics and second language research. Several studies have focused on the development of specific types of complex structures, essentially based on the development of different classes of subordinate clauses distinguished by traditional grammar. The present contribution uses as a theoretical framework Role and Reference Grammar. RRG’s model of clause linkage proposes a different array of possible relations between combined clauses, adding the concept of cosubordination to the traditional dichotomy coordination/subordination, and pays attention to both predicate-based complexification within the clause and full clause combinations. RRG bases its classification of linkage types on the Interclausal Relations Hierarchy (Van Valin & LaPolla 1997), which unites syntactic and semantic aspects of clause complexification. The present article focuses on the syntax-semantics interface as realized within the Interclausal Relations Hierarchy, and on its impact on the acquisition of clause linkage structures by adolescent L2 learners of English. The corpus consists of oral narrative English interlanguage data elicited from 12- to 18-year-old Dutch-speaking secondary school pupils in Flanders (Belgium). Results show that RRG’s main principles of clause linkage are easily applicable to second language acquisition. The syntactic and semantic strength of a given juncture were found to often coincide in the data, as predicted, and any syntactic encoding of a semantic juncture which matches its semantic strength is likely to be acquired more easily and/or earlier than non-matching realizations. Although not all predictions made by RRG concerning structural variation were confirmed by our L2 English data, we conclude that RRG provides a fruitful, coherent and powerful framework for studying clause linkage and sentence complexification in spoken L2 learner discourse.

The development of lexical complexity in second language acquisition has received a considerable amount of attention in applied linguistics research. Many studies have examined the role of lexical diversity, sophistication and density as indicators of L2 proficiency. Few studies, though, have considered the development of lexical complexity from an explicitly cross-linguistic perspective. This article reports on an explorative, cross-linguistic study on the development of lexical diversity, sophistication and density in L2 French and English at four levels of linguistic proficiency. Additionally, the study proposes a number of alternative measures tapping into collocational knowledge and lexical sophistication. The analyses were carried out on a cross-sectional, multilingual corpus of L2 French and English consisting of oral narrative data. The results show a similar development of lexical diversity in L2 French and English, but considerably different developmental tendencies in terms of sophistication and density. The concluding sections discuss possible explanations for these differences and consequences for the measurement of linguistic proficiency.

The study offers an in-depth analysis of motion descriptions in Polish and English, i.e. a typologically related pair of languages that differ in manner salience, by Polish second language users of English. 20 bilingual Polish-English speakers were recruited among senior year students in an English-medium university programme and compared with Polish and English monolingual control groups. All the participants were asked to retell in detail a fragment of a Canary Row cartoon. The elicited narratives were analyzed to identify all manner and path components. The results show that the L2 users overuse path verbs in their L2 English and underuse common verbs like go and get that are unspecified for path or manner. While such behaviour constitutes evidence of L1→L2 transfer, it is argued that it is also target-like and provides evidence of desensitization to manner cues in attentional processing related to L2 production.

This study aimed to assess whether attentional allocation to direct object pronouns in L2 Spanish was influenced by external or internal manipulations of attention and whether these manipulations caused learning of the form. Attention was measured by fixation duration and skipping rate on the pronouns, and learning was measured with a sentence interpretation task. Results provided empirical evidence that both types of manipulations direct attention to target forms, but in different ways, and bring about learning. In addition to examining the role of attention, the present study examined how different types of motivation, (i.e., integrative, intrinsic and extrinsic) were related to both attentional allocation and learning and found that intrinsic and extrinsic motivation were related to different attentional manipulations. Results are informative for models of L2 acquisition that posit a role for attention, instructed L2 acquisition and L2 motivation research.

Examining influences of two participant factors, i.e., proficiency and working memory (WM), in second language (L2) sentence processing, we discuss how Japanese learners of English (JLEs) with distinct proficiency levels and WM capacities comprehend relative clauses in English. Reading times (RTs) were collected from intermediate and elementary levels of JLEs with different WM capacities using a self-paced reading task. The results revealed that: (1) JLEs had difficulty interpreting object relative clauses with animate antecedents; (2) JLEs at the elementary level processed the critical region in subject relative clauses with animate antecedents faster than that in object relative clauses with animate antecedents; (3) JLEs with the large WM capacity read embedded verbs faster than those with the small WM capacity; and (4) RTs of the verb region in the subject relative clause were shorter than those in the object relative clause. From these results, we propose that lower proficient L2 learners depend heavily on animacy information when they comprehend relative clauses though there appears evidence that JLEs also make use of structural information. Moreover, we suggest that WM has a positive role in the L2 comprehension process, similar to findings in previous L2 processing studies.