Toegepaste Taalwetenschap in Artikelen - Volume 34, Issue 1, 1989

This research focused on the incidental learning of the meaning of new word forms occurring in a reading passage. In five experiments, a comparison was made of the retention effects of several ways to orient readers to the meaning of twelve new word forms ("targets"), occurring in a reading passage, containing otherwise simple vocabulary. In all experiments the same four-page Dutch reading passage was used (on the role of advertisement agencies). In experiments I, III, and V, the targets were 12 Dutch low frequency verbs. Subjects in these experiments were adult intermediate learners of Dutch as a second language (65, 45, and 35 Ss respectively). In experiments II and IV, these Dutch verbs were replaced by twelve pseudo-verbs. Subjects in these two experiments were adult Dutch native speakers (98 and 52 Ss respectively). In the margin of the text various sorts of cues were given, orienting the readers in various ways to the meaning of the targets. The following orienting cues (experimental conditions) were compared: (1) Translation: Translation of the target into LI (Exp. I), (2) Synonym: Dutch synonym of the target (Exp. II-V), (3) Context: a sample sentence providing a concise and highly specific context for the target's meaning (Exp. I and II), (4) Multiple Choice: four (Exp. I-III) or two (Exp. IV-V) verbs to choose from, one verb being a correct synonym, the other verbs giving wrong meanings (distractors), and (5) Control: absence of cue (Exp. I-II). In all five experiments Ss read the text and answered six multiple-choice comprehension questions, each question pertaining to the meaning of one or two paragraphs. This reading-for-comprehension task was unexpectedly followed by some posttests, eliciting knowledge of the twelve targets (incidental learning). In experiments IV and V half of the Ss were informed that retention tests were to follow the reading task (intentional learning).The results of these five experiments and the conclusions drawn from them can be summarized as follows:1. The retention of word meanings in a truly incidental task is very poor indeed. The chance that readers will remember the meaning of an unknown word, occurring once in the text, is minimal.2. The presence of an orienting cue enhances word meaning retention, as compared to the absence of an orienting cue. In the latter case, readers often spontaneously infer a wrong (although possible) meaning.3. From 2 it follows that in language pedagogy one should try to assess the differential effect of various orienting cues, rather than compare giving the meaning to the reader/learner (cue presence) with having the reader/learner infer the meaning without any help (cue absence).4. A comparison between the Multiple Choice and the Synonym conditions showed in three out of four experiments that the former had a higher retention effect than the latter in an incidental (as opposed to intentional) learning setting. With the multiple-choice procedure, however, there is a chance that the readerAearner infers a wrong meaning (distractor). This procedure should therefore only be used in the classroom, with immediate feedback from the teacher. For unguided reading/learning at home, the synonym (or translation) procedure seems to be more appropriate.5. The results of these experiments provide modest evidence for a mental effort hypothesis. The net retention effect (i.e. in an incidental learning task) of conditions in which the meaning of unknown words must be inferred by the reader/earner is higher than of conditions in which the meaning is given. However, as said under 4, it is assumed that language teachers will generally opt for the safer procedure of giving the meaning of an unknown word, rather than for the (somewhat) more effective procedure of having the reader/learner infer the meaning.

In communicative foreign Language teaching there is more emphasis on vocabulary than in traditional structural approaches where it takes second place to grammar. Two important questions concerning the vocabulary are: what words to present and how to present them? The first question can be answered on the basis of a (socio)linguistic analysis of the communicative needs of the target group. The answer to the second question must be derived from psycholinguistic and semantic theories about how words are learned and stored in the mental lexicon.This paper deals with one aspect of the first question (viz. how many words?) and discusses some possible applications of psychological theories about word learning and word storage.As to the first question it is argued for the intermediate levels that to (partially) avoid word selection problems (what and how many?) the syllabus should include twice as many words (say 6.000) as are traditionally presented. If students master 50% of this list, they should be able to handle semi-authentic reading and listening material by contextually guessing the unknown words since most of the texts (about 95%) will be covered by the words they know.As to the second question (how to present words) it is argued that for intentional word learning, a contextualised presentation is preferable since it provides the student with more possiblities to embed the word in the interrelated networks of various kinds that constitute our memory.A distinction should be made however between "easy" and "difficult" words, easy implying a direct syntactic and semantic equivalence between the LI and L2 (i.e. same concept, different label) and difficult referring to cases where there is no such similarity (i.e. concept and label different). Some emperical evidence is discussed that leads to the conclusion that it is more efficient (taking time and output into consideration) to present difficult words only in context and easy words without context. Finally an experimental technique is discussed (called graded contextual desambiguation) that tries to grade the mental operations necessary for working out the meaning of an unknown word.

This paper reports research into the acquisition of vocabulary in a foreign language, more specifically into the supposition that 'guessing' (i.e. inferring the meaning of an unknown word from context and word-form) contributes substantially to retention. Although much is to be said for the latter, the empirical underpinning of this supposition has so far been slight and various questions have remained. In order to gain a better insight into these we have carried out an experiment in a classroom setting, focussing on the following questions:1.Which factors of context influence the guessability of words?2.What is the influence of these factors on receptive retention (after guessing and learning)?3.What is the relationship between guessing and retention? (Are words which have been correctly guessed better retained than words which have not been correctly guessed?)The chief findings of the experiment are:l.A specific ('pregnant') filler of the slots 'subject', 'verb' and 'function' contributes to the guessability of a word in a particular sentential context.2. A specific ('pregnant') filler of the slots mentioned in guessing and learning has no effect on the retention ('subject' and 'verb') or even a negative effect ('function').3.There is no positive correlation between guessing and retention (after guessing and learning; for some words there is even a negative correlation.To sum up: a 'pregnant' context does indeed induce better guessing, but subsequently it does not induce a better retention of the meaning involved, at least not if the guessing stage is followed by a learning stage using the same context as in guessing.

Recently learning psychologists have tried to prove that learning vocabulary in paired lists is more efficient than learning vocabulary in contexts.However, closer inspection of their experimental designs reveals undeniably that the evidence presented is not very reliable. The experiments are based on linguistically naive assumptions. Polysemy within and heterosemy between languages have not sufficiently been taken into account. The assumptions concerning the mental lexicon are equally naive in that they do not account for the highly structured design of the mental lexicon.Fundamental insights from linguistics and learning psychology support contextual learning of vocabulary. Especially vocabulary learning by means of "pregnant" contexts that foster mental elaboration seems to be highly recommendable. It is furthermore argued that the acquisition of the polysemous and syntactically and morphologically versatile profile of vocabulary items should begin with the prototypical meaning of words, which can be inferred from word association lists obtained with native speakers

The article reports the results of a four-year project on the use of compensatory strategies (CpS) by Dutch learners of English at three different proficiency levels. As expected, the number of CpS used by foreign language (L2) learners was inversely related to their L2 proficiency level. The type of CpS used proved to be largely task-related, however. The subjects predominantly used analytic strategies in a picture naming/description task, while in a story retell task, and particularly when participating in an interview with a native speaker of English, they also used many holistic strategies and transfer strategies.To explain the task-related variation in CpS use it was suggested that the subjects adhered to Grice's cooperative principle and the principle of economy when selecting CpS. Consequently, they attempted to use CpS that were both effective (in the context) and required minimal processing effort. Where this proved to be impossible, the importance of the communicative goal, the complexity of the task and the amount of time available determined their choice between using effective CpS and spending little effort.

The description of language is in a sense just like statistics: on the basis of a sample the linguist wants to get an idea of the language as a whole. However, statistical procedures can only be used with units which are in a significant way interchangeable. This article attempts to define the basic units of real communicative language use. These appear to be not words, but elements that are termed lexical units, i.e. concrete realizations of language functions in a situation. To select a basic vocabulary that is communicatively relevant, it will be necessary to analyze large samples of real communication and to take into account the factors which may influence the use of language in different situations.

Since 1985 English has been an obligatory subject in the last two classes of Dutch primary schools. This fact provided an inducement to carry out an investigation to examine if balanced bilingual Turkish and Moroccan children would react differently from Dutch monolingual children to these English classes. Surprisingly research into third language learning appears to be very rare and seems to indicate on the one hand that bilingualism is not always an advantage. On the other hand research on cognitive and metalinguistic abilities of bilingual children suggests that bilinguals may benefit from having this specific learning experience. This research therefore aimed at testing the hypothesis that bilinguals would learn a third language in a different and more efficient way than monolinguals with the same IQ-level and socio-economic status.In this article a word production and a word comprehension test are discussed, which were administered to the subjects' groups after two years of learning English. The selection of subjects, a lexical analysis of textbooks and the test construction are described. The results of the two tests do not show any differences between mono- and bilinguals, which means that, with regard to vocabulary acquisition, bilingualism does not have a positive influence on learning a new language. The results of other tests (grammatical judgements, spontaneous production and word recognition) will show if this finding can be generalized to other skills.

The results of a recently completed research project into the retention of receptive skills in French by students and ex-students of the highest type of Dutch secondary education, VWO, showed that these skills hardly decrease during a period of four years after course completion. The fact that vocabulary would not suffer from such a period of non-use was particularly surprising.As part of this investigation a lexical decision experiment was carried out with two of the six groups involved in the main project. This experiment showed that taking decisions on the (il)legitimacy of French words takes more time already after two years after course completion, especially with respect to low-frequency non-cognates.The results of the main project are evaluated in the light of these findings. In addition, implications of these findings are discussed as they have been incorporated in further research.

Many ethnic minority children have enormous gaps in their Dutch vocabulary. In the research described in this article it has been examined whether these children can learn new words more effectively after instruction about Dutch lexical morphology. It was expected that pupils with knowledge about the structure of words would be able to better analyze parts of the structure of unknown words.However, lexical-morphological rules contain many restrictions and irregularities, which is one of the reasons why many of these rules are acquired rather late in the language acquisition process. It was thought that explicit instruction about simple lexical morphological rules might bring about an improved awareness of structures of words.A test-retest experiment was set up in order to find empirical proof for this assumption. First a pre-test was given, in which Dutch children as well as ethnic minority children (age 12) participated. In this test the passive knowledge of nine affixes was measured. Instruction about lexical morphology was given one week afterwards. The effect of this instruction was examined in a post-test.After analyzing the results the most important hypothesis was proved: the pupils showed significant progress on the post-test. The ethnic minority children even made more progress than the Dutch children. Children appararently can become aware of structures of words through explicit instruction. The knowledge gained this way enables them to analyze new words more effectively and helps them to enlarge their passive vocabulary.

Early word form representations are assumed to be unanalyzed 'routines'. Around age 2 1/2, when the first 50 to 100 words have been acquired, the organization of the mental lexicon starts to change. Word form representations are segmented into their constituent linguistic substructures: syllable and phonemes. Gradually the network-like structure which is thought to capture the mature mental lexicon emerges. Peters (1983, 1985) has proposed two heuristics that may be employed by children for segmenting words, both during this 'reorganization' and afterwards, when new words are acquired and inserted into the rapidly expanding lexicon. The first employs word stress, the second is based on matches between a new form and lexical items that have already been acquired.This study investigates in an experimental fashion whether children use stress and formal similarities in segmentation. Children (4, 5 and 6 yrs. old) were asked to alter syllable onsets in trisyllabic words with stress on either of the three syllables, and in trisyllabic complex words in which at least one morpheme could be expected to be known by the subjects.It appeared that word-internal onsets of stressed syllables were more often altered than onsets of unstressed syllables. These results are supportive of the 'stress' heuristic. Also, syllable onsets which coincided with word-internal lexical morpheme boundaries (i.e., boundaries between known and unknown parts which can also occur independently) were more often altered than non-boundary onsets. However, syllable onsets at root-suffix boundaries were not altered more frequently than non-boundary onsets. This difference between lexical morpheme boundaries and suffix boundaries is not predicted by a segmenting heuristic based on formal match. It is therefore suggested that in fact prosodic characteristics of the final morphemes in the complex words factors could be responsible for the difference: all first (or only) syllables of the right-hand lexical morphemes were stressable, whereas the suffixes were not.This conjecture was tested in a second experiment in which 7 and 8 year old children were asked to alter syllable onsets in derivations consisting of a bisyllabic root and a monosyllabic suffix. Some suffixes were stressed, others were unstressed and still others caused stress in the stem morphemes to be shifted to the second syllabe. It was found that stressed suffixes yielded more alterations than unstressed suffixes. Second, stressed syllables, in general, yielded more onset alterations than unstressed syllables, regardless of whether stress was assigned by the stem morpheme or by derivation with a stress-shifting suffix. Finally, syllables which had 'lost' stress as a result of dervational stress shift produced more alterations than unstressed syllables that were not stressed, in the stem morpheme either.These results support the conjecture that the apparent effects of formal match on segmentation behavior in the first experiment can be explained by reference to stress. Consequently, it is concluded that stress is the primary cue in word segmentation. This conclusion is in accordance with 'prosodic bootstrapping' theory, which claims that children are 'programmed' to use prosodic features as clues to linguistic structure.

Chomsky's notions of 'knowledge' and 'ability' are discussed, and are distinguished from the notion 'performance'. 'Knowledge' is taken to refer to the native speaker's abstract knowledge of the language system, 'ability' is taken to refer to the (no less abstract) processing mechanisms underlying speech production and perception, whereas 'performance' is used for referring to the actual linguistic behavior at some particular moment, in some particular situation. Subsequently, a case-study of the development of language and speech during the third year is presented. Twelve hours of spontaneous speech, produced by one child at ages 2:4, 2:6, 2:7, 2:8, 2:9, and 2:11 are analyzed (two hours per period). The development of sentence structure over periods suggests that the child is differentiating function words and content words as separate word classes (development of 'knowledge'). Also, there is a temporary increase of disfluencies and production errors in the periods 2:7 to 2:9 (development of 'performance'). It is argued that these changes in knowledge on the one hand and performance on the other are related, and that this relation is mediated by changes in 'ability', i.e., in the processing mechanism underlying speech production. Two kinds of 'effort' displayed by this mechanism are distinguished: 'syntactic' or planning effort, which is investigated by analyzing developmental changes in the child's peak performances (his longest, most complex sentences in each of the six periods), and 'articulatory' effort, which is investigated by analyzing developmental changes in the way in which the words of sentences that are immediate and complete self-repetitions are articulated, as compared to the way in which these same words were articulated in the preceding instance of the sentence. In his syntactic effort, the child appears to become increasingly concerned with producing function words; at age 2:7 (the start of the temporary increase in disfluencies) there is a significant increase in the relative number of function words per sentence, and this is especially clear in the longest sentences. At the same time however, the child seems to concentrate his articulatory effort on content words; from age 2:7 onward content words tend to be articulated more accurately in the repetition of an utterance than in its first production, whereas the same does not hold for function words. In the Discussion it is suggested that the differentiation of function and content words ('knowledge') causes a certain imbalance within the developing production mechanism ('ability'), in that function words and content words start 'competing' for effort, each at a different processing level. This, in its turn, might play a role in the observed temporary increase of disfluencies and production errors ('performance').

In this article a description is given of a series of experiments in which it was tried to discover to what extend lexical items from two languages are stored separately or jointly. The experimental tasks used were lexical decision tasks with repetition and priming. Four different types of words were used that varied with respect to similarity in form and meaning in the two languages Dutch and English. Subjects were Dutch university students and members of staff from the English department. It was shown that words that are similar in the two langauges with respect to both form and meaning have a single representation in the lexicon, while words that were similar in form but different in meaning have separate representations for the two languages. For the nearly balanced bilinguals (members of staff) it was found that even for the real cognates (form and meaning similarity) the lexical elements have language separate representations. Apparently, the lexical organisation is different for advanced and very advanced speakers of a foreign language