Toegepaste Taalwetenschap in Artikelen - Volume 20, Issue 1, 1984

This survey article discusses the results of research into the influence of context on visual and especially on auditory word recognition. In auditory word recognition the main problem is the lack of phonetic invariance in the realization of words. Context helps to minimize this problem.Word recognition appears to be influenced by semantically related words occurring in prior context. There is some evidence that foreign language listeners, like very young native speakers, make more use of context than adult native speakers. Syntax seems to play a role in word recognition, too, as does the context following the word in question.

This article gives a critical review of some research in listening comprehension in a foreign language. Several important methodological failures are discussed: lack of systematic variation of the input, measurement after the relevant initial listening process and measurement by means of (re)production tasks. These failures lead to unsatisfactory data if one wants to discover the real problems foreign language learners have when listening to texts in a foreign language. Arguments are given which show that to some extent word recognition research can avoid the above-mentioned failures.

The pendulum in foreign language acquisition theories seems to be on its way back. The rather extreme view held bij Krashen and others that L1 interference plays a minor part in foreign language acquisition is being refuted by more empirical counterevidence.While most of the evidence is taken from students' performance in the productive skills and is considered in a L1 -L2 context, this article deals with evidence from a receptive skill which has been analysed in a broader context.

A comparison was made between French and Dutch pitch contours at the level of the word and the prosodic word. The overlap between the two systems was supposed to cause problems in the segmentation of words in speech communication for French dominant and Dutch dominant French-Dutch bilinguals. Two types of experiments were reported. In the first type native speakers of French (French dominant French-Dutch bilinguals) read Dutch sentences. These sentences are ambiguous without orthographic or intonational specification. The resulting French coloured realisations were interpreted by native speakers of Dutch in a way which differed from the interpretation suggested by Dutch orthography.In a second type of experiment pitch contours were manipulated by means of a resynthesis program. The same kind of sentences as in the first experiment were read by native speakers of French (French dominant French-Dutch bilinguals). On the sentences produced by these speakers a Dutch pitch contour was superimposed. This contour corresponded to the orthographic form in which the sentence had been presented to the native speakers of French. Other prosodie or segmental parameters were left unmodified. The resulting sentences were presented to native speakers of Dutch. The results showed that these native speakers of Dutch interpreted these manipulated sentences according to the orthography of the original Dutch stimulus.To control for the influence of other prosodie or segmental features of French in the realisation of the Dutch sentences by the French speakers, a number of Dutch sentences of the same kind as in the previous experiments were read by native speakers of Dutch. Their realisations were provided with a pitch contour corresponding to the contours the French speakers had realised on the same type of sentences. The effect of the pitch modification on the interpretation of these sentences by native speakers of Dutch was the same as the effect of having French dominant bilinguals read the original Dutch sentences.

This article deals with some fundamental aspects of understanding spoken language in general and spoken French by non-native speakers of French in particular.The problem is discussed within a theoretical framework based on Marslen-Wilson's cohort theory, Morton's Information Processing theory, and psychological skill theory. It is predicted i) that a word form is recognized the more readily as it resembles more its "canonic" (=citation) form and ii) that a word is recognized more rapidly by native than by non-native speakers. In French there are three phenomena that affect the canonic form. They all have to do with the specific structure of French, where syllable boundaries often do not co-incide with word boundaries, and where syllable structure generally has priority over word structure.These three phenomena are elision, liaison and enchaînement. In experiments on the word recognition by native and non-native speakers of French we found that:- Native speakers recognize words more rapidly than non-native speakers- Elision has an important effect on word recognition when it occurs at the beginning of a word, none at all at the end of the word, whereas the influence of Enchaînement and Liaison on word recognition seems to be less important for both native and non-native speakers.

In our article, we discuss the quality of two tests of writing proficiency at university level; the two tests represent two realistic tasks at this level: summary, and short, informative text.We investigated the practicability of the tests, and the reliability of rating procedures empirically. Different groups of 30 university students wrote summaries of two texts, and short, informative texts on three subjects. The writing of one such summary took 40 minutes, the writing of a short, informative text 90 minutes; the length of a summary had to be about 100 words, the length of the short, informative text about 300 words.Each summary, or text, i.e. the writings of one group of 30 students, was rated by two raters, who worked independently; they rated, separately with an interval of some days, a-correctness of language, and b-content and organisation. In order to improve the reliability of rating, correctness of language was rated per paragraph: raters divided each summary in three, each informative text in four paragraphs of approximately equal length, and scored each paragraph separately; while rating the content and organisation, raters had to discern two, or four different aspects among which the complete-ness of the content, and the organisation (of paragraphs and) of text.Raters didn't have to analyse texts thoroughly: for each rating they read a text once or twice. In this way, a summary can be rated in 2+3= 5 minutes, an informative text in 3+5= 8 minutes. Correlations between ratings of correctness of language and of content and organisation of the same rater were not very high; they were lowest for the informative text; this suggests the well-foundedness of the separate rating of these two aspects. Rater-reliability was higher for correctness of language than for content and organisation.To ensure satisfactory reliability, two ratings are necessary, but even then two raters disagree in about 30% of the cases: these should be reconsidered.In our opinion, it is possible to reduce rating time: our fin-dings show that if rater A only rates correctness of language, and if rater does rate the same texts for content and organisation, they will agree in about 60% of the cases. Each of them should then rate the other aspect for the 40% of students whose work is to be reconsidered. The time left can, finally, be spent to reconsider the most difficult cases they don't yet agree about. This reduction of rating time is of particular interest if students are asked to write, for the sake of reliability, two (or more) texts.

Teachers have long been aware of the relationship between the learner's personality and his achievement in a foreign language. The aim of this article is to give an impression of the kind of research into this relationship that has been going on for some time at the Institute of Applied Linguistics of the University of Groningen.In the first section the notion 'aspect of cognitive style' is introduced. In the next section four such aspects are discussed and their possible relationships to the grammatical and communicative skills gone into. In section 3 a brief look is taken at the tests and at the sample groep used to test the hypothetical relationships. In the final section some tentative conclusions are drawn.

The study reported here was sparked off by the intuitive feeling that the errors made by Dutch students in the use of the definite article in Spanish are due to an incorrect notion of the generic article. The results of a Spanish-Dutch contrastive analysis are presented, as well as an analysis of errors made by Dutch and Spanish subjects in four translation and blanks tests. Grammar books, in describing the generic system, tend to pay attention only to the use of the article in subject position. Our analysis indicate that more attention should be paid to the use of the article in co-ordinated subjects and objects, and in active and passive sentences.