Dutch Journal of Applied Linguistics - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2013

Hoewel de spelling van Nederlandse verledentijdsvormen van zwakke werkwoorden algemeen als eenvoudig wordt beschouwd (ze zijn immers klankzuiver) maken zelfs universiteitsstudenten opvallend veel fouten bij de keuze tussen de uitgangen -te en -de. Voor een deel zijn die fouten ‘natuurlijk’ in die zin dat ze het gevolg zijn van de werking van frequentie en analogie. Anderzijds stellen we vast dat Nederlanders veel meer fouten maken dan Vlamingen, althans als de stam op een coronale fricatief eindigt (s, z, f, v). Aangezien de Nederlandse proefpersonen de ‘regel’ (het ezelsbruggetje ’t kofschip) beter lijken te beheersen dan de Vlamingen, moet de verklaring voor het verschil gezocht worden in een klankverandering die zich wel in Nederland maar niet of nauwelijks in Vlaanderen voordoet, de verstemlozing van de fricatieven. Het spellingprobleem vraagt om didactische maatregelen en/of politieke: het kan wellicht grotendeels worden opgelost door de spellingregels een weinig aan te passen.

The present study investigates English spelling performance of Dutch grammar school students to establish whether Dutch grammar school students are able to spell words differing in complexity, as well as whether they are sensitive to the information available in the spellings (phonological, orthographical, and lexical frequency). Twenty-one Dutch foreign language learners of English were presented with an English dictation task (from Kemp, Parrila, & Kirby, 2009). They had to spell base (uninflected) and derived (inflected) words and pseudowords which were matched on the basis of their phonological or orthographical patterns. Students also had to complete a Dutch dictation task, and a word and pseudoword reading task. Findings show that the students obtained higher scores on spelling words versus pseudowords, base versus derived targets, and on phonological versus orthographical targets. There was no correlation between Dutch and English spelling proficiency. These data are interpreted within a usage-based model of language acquisition.

This study investigated the perception of six Chinese emotional prosodies (neutrality, happiness, anger, surprise, sadness and sarcasm) by 20 Chinese native listeners, 20 naïve Dutch listeners and 20 advanced Dutch L2 learners of Chinese. The results showed that advanced Dutch L2 learners of Chinese recognized Chinese emotional prosody significantly better than Chinese native listeners and Dutch naïve listeners. The results also indicated that naïve non-native listeners could recognize emotions in an unknown language as well as the natives did. Chinese native listeners did not show an in-group advantage for identifying emotions in Chinese more accurately and confidently. Neutrality was the easiest emotion for all the three listener groups to identify and anger was recognized equally well by all the listener groups. The prediction made in the beginning of the study is confirmed, which claims that listeners of a tonal language will be less intent on paralinguistic use of prosody than listeners of a non-tonal language.

Die Studie untersucht den Einfluss sprachspezifischer morpho-syntaktischer Eigenschaften (z.B. flexible Wortstellung, Kasus) auf den Erwerb von Verb-Argumentstrukturen im Deutschen. Zu diesem Zweck wurden 65 drei- bis neunjährige Deutsch lernende Kinder aufgefordert, kanonische (Das Schaf läuft) und nicht-kanonische Sätze (*Das Schaf läuft das Pferd) nachzuspielen. Vorangegangene Arbeiten (Naigles, Fowler & Helm, 1992) haben gezeigt, dass Englisch lernende Kinder, die mit solchen nicht-kanonischen Sätzen konfrontiert wurden, die gebräuchliche Verbbedeutung entsprechend der nicht-kanonischen Argumentstruktur veränderten (Frame Compliance). Erwachsene, vor dieselbe Aufgabe gestellt, änderten dagegen die Argumentstruktur des Satzes entsprechend der Bedeutung des Verbs (Verb Compliance). Das Alter, ab dem Kinder bei der Interpretation nicht-kanonischer Sätze von Frame zu Verb Compliance umschwenkten, hing dabei stark von der Struktur des vorgegebenen Satzes ab. Unsere Ergebnisse bestätigen diese Abhängigkeit. Jedoch zeigen sie im Vergleich zum Englischen auch eine wesentlich ausgeprägtere Verb Compliance in allen Altersstufen, die durch die angenommenen sprachspezifischen Faktoren verursacht worden sein könnte.

The European Union encourages all its citizens to be able to speak two languages in addition to their mother tongue. However, since the content of educational systems is the responsibility of individual member states, promoting multilingualism depends on the language policy of each member state. Still, countries may learn from practices and experiences in other countries. The similarities and differences between two case studies may be instructive from that point of view. In this paper, language policy and language education in two EU member states are compared with each other: the Netherlands on the one hand and Romania on the other. Questions that will be raised are: what are the linguistic rights of the minority groups, which languages are taught to whom, and to which degree is multilingualism an issue in both countries? Despite differences between the two countries, some striking similarities are observed.

This article is about the type of language that is offered to learners in textbooks, using the example of Russian. Many modern textbooks of Russian as a foreign language aim at efficient development of oral communication skills. However, some expressions used in the textbooks are not typical for everyday language. We claim that textbooks’ content should be reassessed based on actual language use, following theoretical and methodological models of cognitive and corpus linguistics. We extracted language patterns from three textbooks, and compared them with alternative patterns that carry similar meaning by (1) calculating the frequency of occurrence of each pattern in a corpus of spoken language, and (2) using Russian native speakers’ intuitions about what is more common. The results demonstrated that for 39 to 53 percent of all the recurrent patterns in the textbooks better alternatives could be found. We further investigated the typical shortcomings of the extracted patterns.

The verb complement structure (VC) poses difficulties for L2 learners since English verbs vary on which type of complement they require or allow, and this variability may impact acquisition. Although theoretical papers have discussed this structure, few papers describe the language performance of L2 learners. In addition, only rarely is oral production analyzed. To address this gap, we examined infinitival and gerundival VCs produced in free production speech by high-intermediate learners of English as a second language with mixed language backgrounds. Importantly, we explored the constructions by the VC produced and by the matrix verb requirements which has been underreported. Both aspects are necessary to understand what makes a VC attempt incorrect. These learners produced many VC constructions but not always correctly. The majority of the errors in VC usage involved either using neither marker or using both, even with matrix verbs which allow either VC.