EUROSLA Yearbook - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2005

On the basis of Hindi-English Interlanguage data, Bhatt and Hancin-Bhatt (2002) advance the Structural Minimality hypothesis in which C-domain categories are not licensed in early second language (L2) acquisition, and claim that this leads early L2 learners to misconstrue Prepositional Phrases in the immediate vicinity of the complementizer that introducing an embedded clause. We show, however, that the Structural Minimality thesis is conceptually weak and the argumentation seeking to establish it flawed in three areas: experimental design, reporting of results, and interpretation. Using data from Garcia (1998), we report asymmetries — in the construal of PPs immediately preceding the complementizer versus PPs immediately following the complementizer — that show that knowledge of the C-domain is necessarily implicated in L2 English. We argue that these asymmetries are rooted in the performance system, and we present additional supporting evidence from English-French Interlanguage that is, moreover, highly revealing of the precise, universal sentence processing mechanisms involved. Bhatt and Hancin-Bhatt’s (2002) proposal, in contrast, simply fails to explain any of these asymmetries.

This study investigates the acquisition of English verb movement phenomena by two groups of adult French native speakers: a group of secondary school students and a group of university students. A group of English native speakers served as controls. Participants were administered a written questionnaire composed of a controlled production task, a grammaticality judgment task, and a preference/grammaticality judgment task, to test acquisition of the syntactic properties associated with the verb movement parameter (Pollock 1989, 1997). Instead of substantiating the anecdotal evidence that suggests that adverb placement errors persist into very advanced stages of English L2 acquisition, the present data support the successful acquisition of English adverb placement by French native speakers. It is argued that the advanced group has acquired the appropriate L2 parametric value as measured by the controlled production task; while results on the other two tasks are explained by performance effects.

The Aspect Hypothesis (AH) (Andersen 1986, 1991) suggests an eight-stage development of the Spanish tense–aspect system by English learners in which tenses progressively mark verb categories. The current paper, which presents some of the main findings from Labeau (2005), explores the relevance of the AH to an acquisitional setting other than that for which it was developed. Specifically, it tests the four tenets of the AH, as described by Shirai and Kurono (1998) against data from the acquisition of the French tense/aspect system by advanced learners of French in a tutored environment. It compares the use of French verbal morphology by advanced Anglophone learners with a control group of native speakers engaging in a variety of tasks: (1) oral and written narratives (2) a grammar cloze-test and (3) a written editing task. Having shown that the basic hypothesis is unable to account for the development of advanced French, the study tests an expanded version of the AH (Andersen 2002) and suggests further factors to take into account in the description of advanced stages of tense–aspect acquisition.

Young children often express possession before they have mastered the linguistic means to express this notion in adult forms. In this paper we present evidence on the acquisition of possessive constructions in bilingual children acquiring a Germanic and a Romance language (i.e. Dutch/French and Dutch/Italian). In a multiple case study, we compare their acquisition with that of monolingual children and suggest that while the stages of acquisition in monolingual and bilingual children are largely the same, the possessive constructions of the bilingual children show signs of cross-linguistic influence. This influence goes mainly from Dutch (the dominant language) to the Romance language, but there are also signs of influence from the Romance language on Dutch. This is in contradiction to earlier claims (Hulk and Mueller 2000, 2001, for example), where influence is predicted to be unidirectional.

This paper compares grammatical and pragmatic development in foreign language learners of Swedish. For the analysis of grammatical proficiency, data from translation tasks and essays were tested against the stage model proposed in Processability Theory, which identifies five stages of morpho-syntactic development for Swedish (Pienemann 1998, Pienemann and Håkansson 1999). For the pragmatic analysis a gap-fill task was used, inspired by the discourse completion task (Blum-Kulka 1982, Kasper and Roever 2005), but taking into consideration sequential aspects of the interaction. All tasks were piloted with a control group of Swedish native speakers. The results indicate a relationship between native-like pragmatic command and a high level of morpho-syntactic processability. The findings suggest that students whose grammatical processing capacity is restricted to lower levels find it difficult to contextualise their utterances in a pragmatically appropriate way.

This paper presents a study of the development of L2 pragmatic competence in the speech act of criticisms. Data were collected from three proficiency groups of Vietnamese foreign language learners of English via a conversation elicitation task and a written questionnaire. An interview was also conducted to probe into the learners’ pragmatic decision-making. Results show that the strongest difference among the learners lay in the area of modifiers to criticisms, rather than in the criticism strategies per se. Specifically, as the learners became more proficient in the L2, they mitigated their criticisms more often, thanks to a better control over language processing. However, they still lagged far behind the native speaker group in the frequency of their use of mitigators. These proficiency effects were explained by the EFL context, which probably did not much facilitate pragmatic development, given the learners’ insufficient exposure to the target norms.

This paper reports on a study in which two models proposed to explain the influence of cognitive task complexity on linguistic performance in L2 are tested and compared. The two models are Robinson’s Cognition Hypothesis (Robinson 2001a, 2001b) and Skehan and Foster’s Limited Attentional Capacity Model (Skehan 1998, Skehan and Foster 2001). Sixty-two Dutch university students of Italian performed two writing tasks with prompts of differing cognitive complexity. Linguistic performance was operationalized in terms of syntactic complexity, lexical variation and accuracy. The study provides partial support for the Cognition Hypothesis, in so far as the written products of the cognitively more demandings task turned out to be more accurate, with significantly lower error ratios per T-unit than those of the cognitively less demanding task. In addition stronger effects of cognitive task complexity were found for high-proficiency learners than for low-proficiency learners. No effects could be observed on measures of syntactic complexity or lexical variation.

The realization by applied linguists that second language learners cannot achieve high levels of grammatical competence from entirely meaning centered instruction has led them to propose that learners need to focus on form, i.e. to attend to linguistic elements during a communicative activity (Long 1991, De Keyser 1998, Norris and Ortega 2000, Ellis 2001). However, most advocates of Focus on Form (FonF), have also proscribed Focus on Forms (FonFs), the systematic teaching of isolated grammatical items and rules. So far, FonF research has been concerned with grammatical, not lexical, instruction. In this paper, which was originally presented as a plenary session at the 2004 EUROSLA conference, I examine the need for Focus on Form and the proscription of Focus on Forms from the vocabulary learning perspective.  First, I argue that, similarly to grammar, comprehensible input is insufficient for acquiring vocabulary, and consequently Focus on Form is an essential component of instruction. I base my argument on the fallacy of the assumptions which underlie the vocabulary-through-input hypothesis: the noticing assumption, the guessing ability assumption, the guessing-retention link assumption and the cumulative gain assumption. Second, I defend Focus on Forms and argue against the claim that attention to form must be motivated by and carried out within a communicative task environment. The defense is based on the nature of lexical competence, which is perceived as a combination of different aspects of vocabulary knowledge, vocabulary use, speed of lexical access and strategic competence. The two arguments above will be supported by empirical evidence from three types of vocabulary learning studies: (a) the ‘classic’ task embedded FonF, (b) task related FonFs, and (c) ‘pure’ FonFs studies, unrelated to any task.

A dynamic approach to the acquisition of morphologically complex words assumes that, initially, all words are interpreted holistically. At later stages of acquisition, increasingly more words are analyzed and morphological regularities are discovered. When productivity is defined as the chance that a newly formed word is produced on the basis of a particular affix (Baayen and Lieber, 1991), discovering morphological regularity can be interpreted as discovering productivity. This study finds evidence that contradicts an earlier study (Lowie, 2000) which suggested that morphological productivity starts playing a role only at the most advanced levels of acquisition. The current study used response latencies to test productivity cross-sectionally by comparing English native speaker response rates to those of Dutch learners of English at different levels of proficiency. Using this paradigm, productivity was evident from the earliest stages of acquisition and, at advanced levels, awareness was found even of the productivity of marginally productive affixes.

This paper describes an attempt to elicit examples of spontaneous vocabulary reactivation as a result of a short period of intensive exposure to an L2 environment. The data collected suggests that extensive reactivation may take place under these conditions, but it is largely driven by words that were encountered in the environment. Some spontaneous reactivation occurs as well, but this seems to be on a much smaller scale than is implied in accounts of the ‘Boulogne Ferry Effect’. The paper argues that detailed investigations using co-operative single subjects can sometimes allow us to research questions which are not amenable to experiments using large subject groups.