EUROSLA Yearbook - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2006

Ionin, Ko and Wexler (2004a) have shown that L2 speakers of English whose L1’s lack articles (Russian and Korean) appear to fluctuate in their interpretation of the and a, allowing them to encode either definiteness or specificity. They argue that these are two options of an Article Choice Parameter offered by Universal Grammar, and that the Russian and Korean speakers fluctuate between them when they are acquiring English. In the present study it is shown that a similar pattern can be observed in L2 speakers of English whose L1 is Japanese (also a language that lacks articles) but not in speakers whose L1 is Greek, a language with articles that encode definiteness like English. It is also shown that while group results for the Japanese speakers suggest fluctuation, individual results do not. It is argued that an account can be given of both cases which does not require appeal either to an Article Choice Parameter or to the concept of ‘fluctuation’. The alternative proposal made here is consistent with Universal Grammar, and follows from an organisation of the grammar where phonological exponents are separated from the lexical items manipulated by syntactic computations, as in Distributed Morphology. It is suggested that a descriptively adequate account which avoids a construction-specific parameter like the Article Choice Parameter and departure from the normal assumptions of UG represented by fluctuation should be preferred.

This paper reports an experimental study on L2 vs. L3 Spanish morphological representation. A total of 19 Spanish learners (10 Chinese native speakers who are upper intermediate to advanced L2 English users as well as 9 English native speakers who do not speak a prior language without overt morphology) participated in the study. A written production task using Spanish nonce verbs was used to elicit regular and irregular forms of Spanish past participles. The study revealed differences between native and non-native Spanish speakers but ones that are still compatible with an approach which posits a dual mechanism for morphological processing. In addition, no principal difference between the L2 and the L3 Spanish learners was identified. A follow-up experiment on L2 English was therefore carried out testing 26 native speakers of Chinese and 17 native speakers of English using a written production task eliciting English regular and irregular past tense forms for both real verbs and nonce verbs. The findings suggested that native and non-native English speakers’ performances pattern similarly. It seems that L2 English plays a crucial role in Chinese speakers’ L3 Spanish morphological representation and in their similar performance to the L1 English-L2 Spanish speakers.

Recent proposals argue that interface areas such as syntax/semantics and syntax/pragmatics are particularly difficult for adult learners, in comparison to purely syntactic phenomena (Sorace 2003, 2004). In contrast, other research shows that L2 learners are able to acquire target representations even when the interpretation is not readily available in the input (Borgonovo, Bruhn de Garavito and Prévost 2005, Dekydtspotter and Sprouse 2001). In this paper we add to the growing literature on the acquisition of interpretational properties by showing that adult L2 learners can acquire knowledge of the syntactic correlates of the semantic notion of specificity in constructions involving topicalisation and null objects in Spanish. The learners’ first language (L1) is Brazilian Portuguese, where specificity does not play the role in these constructions that it plays in Spanish. Results show that learners can go beyond their L1 with respect to the acquisition of interface phenomena, suggesting that native-like grammars are attainable in L2 acquisition.

This study starts by testing the assumption that with access to the full range of properties of the language faculty, L2 learners are ultimately successful in assigning target-like meanings to overt forms. A further assumption that can be (implicitly) drawn from this assumption is that L2 pragmatic processes are native-like at Logical Form (in Relevance-theoretic terms, Sperber and Wilson 1986/95). The study focuses on the L2 acquisition of the distributional and interpretational properties of the English present simple (e.g. I cycle to work) and the English present progressive (e.g. I’m cycling to work). Data from advanced L1 French speakers, under varying task conditions, are presented to evaluate these assumptions. In light of any evidence indicating persistent form-meaning mismatches, the results are used to (i) discuss a permanent syntactic deficit as the possible source of difficulty in acquiring target-like form-meaning relationships and (ii) consider the potential implications for pragmatic processes resulting from this deficit.

Dutch is a so-called verb-second language, i.e. the finite verb typically occurs in second position with one constituent in initial position. The element in initial position is often the subject. However, if it is an adverb or an object, the subject occurs after the finite verb. This characteristic, known as ‘inversion’ is acquired in both child first- and adult second-language acquisition as a function of topicalization. Both learner varieties develop from a lexical system to a functional system. At the lexical stage, utterance structure is the result of predicate-argument structure interacting with principles of information structuring. The shift to a functional system comes as a result of the identification of the initial position in a sentence as a structural topic position. It coincides with the acquisition of auxiliary verbs (the category AUX) such that AUX + subject pronoun (subjP) functions as a topicalization device. Hence, inversion is an artifact. It is the result of a process of restructuring due to the acquisition of topicalization. Also the fact that both L1 and L2 Dutch learner systems seem to develop as the result of the interaction between predicate-argument structure and principles of information structuring explains why the process leading to the acquisition of ‘inversion’ takes place similarly in both children and adults.

Word associations have traditionally been used in linguistic research as a means of accessing information about the organisation of the mental lexicon. A number of important studies have revealed differences in word association behaviour in the L1 and the L2, but have failed to find consistent behaviour patterns. The study reported here suggests that this failure might be due to two factors: the choice of stimulus words and the categorisation of responses, which impose artificial constraints on both association behaviour and the exploration of response types. In order to move the investigation of L2 word associations forward, this study compares native speaker responses to a specific set of stimuli with those of advanced non-native speakers. The types of association response made by each group of subjects are investigated by means of a retrospective interview, and patterns in response types are mapped. This results in a new method of categorising word association responses, and provides more precise insight into the differences between L1 and L2 association patterns.

Prior applications of the lexical decision task in second language research have either examined performance accuracy (Meara and Buxton 1987) or speed of response to familiar items (Segalowitz and Segalowitz 1993). This paper examines how well the two measures together serve to discriminate among between-group levels of proficiency and within-group levels of difficulty on an English lexical decision task. Performance was compared across three levels of English proficiency (Intermediate L2, Advanced L2 and English L1 control) and four levels of item difficulty, as defined by frequency of occurrence (words from the 2000, 3000, 5000 and 10,000 most frequently occurring words). Accuracy and reaction time measures systematically decreased as a function of increasing proficiency and frequency level. Response variability, as measured by the coefficient of variance, also decreased as performance improved. The implications of the findings for the use of lexical decision tasks in second language research are discussed.

In recent years, many educational linguists have emphasised the importance of drawing language learners’ attention to multiword units (i.e., strong collocations, idioms, etc.), because knowledge of such units is believed to help learners come across as fluent, native-like and accurate L2 speakers. We report a controlled experiment the results of which support this belief. The question now is how learners can be helped to commit multiword units to memory. We borrow insights from Cognitive Linguistics, which, contrary to other frameworks, holds that the meaning and the lexical composition of many multiword units is motivated rather than arbitrary. The article surveys experiments that were set up to measure the mnemonic effects of presenting multiword units (especially idioms) as semantically and/or phonologically motivated. The overall encouraging results are explainable by established theories of memory, such as ‘levels-of-processing’ and ‘dual coding’ models. At the same time, the results point to cognitive-style variables that may enhance or dampen the effectiveness of the proposed instructional methods.

This paper focuses on two studies into the effects of language anxiety on language processing. Using samples of Croatian L1 — English L2 speakers performing two picture description tasks (one in L1 and one in L2), the studies analysed their oral productions in order to identify a number of temporal and hesitation signals of planning processes. The findings suggest that observing learners using audio and video equipment and trying to increase their anxiety through interpersonal style does not produce a significant difference. However, learners watching someone apparently taking notes on their performance seemed to be significantly anxiety provoking. Qualitative analysis suggests that, in comparison with low anxiety language users, high anxiety language users produce longer texts in L2 than in L1, produce smaller amounts of continuous speech in both L1 and L2, produce filled pauses with a higher mean length in L2 than in L1, have longer mid-clause pauses, fewer repetitions, and make more false starts.

This study investigates the commonly-held belief in the SLA community that second language acquisition is somehow influenced by the learner’s personality. It builds on previous research on the relation between one personality variable, extraversion, and second language acquisition but is innovative in three ways. First, it examines L2 learners’ speech production in two rather than one L2 and thus puts to the test the hypothesis that the effect of extraversion is stable across different target languages (Dewaele and Furnham 2000). Secondly, whereas most previous studies have investigated the effect of extraversion on fluency (e.g. Rossier 1976, Tapasak, Roodin and Vaught 1978, Busch 1982, Dewaele 1998) this study also looks at the potential effect of this variable on the linguistic accuracy and complexity of learners’ L2 speech production. Thirdly, whereas previous studies were mostly cross-sectional in design, this study adds a longitudinal perspective by considering to what extent the effect of the extraversion–introversion dimension on the fluency, complexity and accuracy of learners’ L2 production remains stable over time. Participants were 25 Dutch-speaking secondary school students learning both English and French as foreign languages in Flanders, Belgium.

In this paper I discuss our socio-educational model of second language acquisition and demonstrate how it provides a fundamental research paradigm to investigate the role of attitudes and motivation in learning another language. This is a general theoretical model designed explicitly for the language learning situation, and is applicable to both foreign and second language learning contexts. It has three important features. First, it satisfies the scientific requirement of parsimony in that it involves a limited number of operationally defined constructs. Second, it has associated with it the Attitude/Motivation Test Battery (AMTB) that yields reliable assessments of its major constructs, permitting empirical tests of the model. Third, it is concerned with the motivation to learn and become fluent in another language, and not simply with task and/or classroom motivation.