Toegepaste Taalwetenschap in Artikelen - Volume 53, Issue 1, 1995

Vocabulary acquisition is considered to be one of the most important aspects of foreign language learning, but also of L1 and L2 acquisition. Besides obvious differences, the three language acquisition processes show remarkable similarities, particularly regarding word learning strategies. In this framework the following questions are dealt with: (1) What is the role of word learning strategies in vocabulary instruction? (2) To what extent do pupils differ in word learning strategies? (3) How to best promote that pupils not only acquire, but actually use the acquired strategies?With respect to the first question, the goals of vocabulary instruction and the ways to reach these goals (e.g. by wide reading, using different strategies or attending direct instruction) are made explicit. The second question is illustrated with an example from qualitative research on the differences between strong and weak pupils who were required to guess the meaning of unknown words from illustra-ted texts. As to the third question, the cognitive, affective and motivational conditions for acquiring, valuing and actually using word learning strategies are being discussed.

The main goal of this research is to investigate whether the Principle of Contrastive Usage holds for the linguistic input that young children receive from their parents. This principle predicts that words which are used contrastively are not only different but also similar in meaning. That is, contrasted words will tend (a) to be semantically related, and (b) the semantic relation will tend to be the coordinate relation, since coordinates are conceptually similar (e.g., cat and dog both refer to a kind of animal). Related research questions are what forms of 'contrasting' and/or 'correcting' can be distinguished in the input to children, and what role individual and situational variables play in the occurrence of these forms. The spontaneous speech produced by two mother-child dyads, in natural interaction at home, was analysed. Speech samples had been collected at regular intervals over the second half of the children's third year. Only nouns were examined. Two communicative situations were distinguished, 'free conversation' and 'visually guided conversation' (book reading, making a jig-saw puzzle). Several subcatego-ries of contrast and correction were discriminated. Subcategories shared by both are corrective explicit contrast and corrective implicit contrast. A contrast-specific subcategory is descriptive contrast, correction-specific subcategories are global negation, specific negation, correction by demonstration, and correction by acknowledging similarity. It was found that contrast and correction are strongly correlated in the input, and tend to go together. However, it was also found that contrast but not correction is sensitive to aspects of communicative situation, whereas correction but not contrast is sensitive to individual differences. As to the character of the relationships between the contrasted terms, it was found that the coordinate relation is indeed predominant, most notably in descriptive contrast. Additionally, it was found that parents, when correcting their children, have a clear preference for explicit over implicit contrast when there is any kind of similarity between referents involved, i.e., when the relation between contrasted terms is either coordinate (conceptual similarity) or is based on perceptual or functional similarity.

There is considerable evidence that young children often use novel compounds to label salient instances in familiar categories, spontaneously as well as in experimental settings. Although examples appear in the literature of innovative labels for categories which are unfamiliar or completely new to children, little is known about the role of compounding in this case. A picture naming task was designed to elicit names for concepts assumed to be unknown to young children and not easily recognisable as belonging to a particular category. Each target picture was presented together with pictures of two related and well known concepts. 180 Dutch speaking children, aged 3;0-8;l, participated in the study. Results show that from age 3 on, children are prepared to label novel concepts, appropriateness increasing with age. About two thirds of the appropriate labels consist of novel compound nouns. Influence of type of target concept on appropriateness and compounding is discussed.

Research has shown parallels in the development of linguistic aspects found in sign languages and spoken languages when acquired as a first language (Newport & Meier, 1985). Deaf children of deaf parents (DCDP) are exposed to sign language early and are able to acquire it effortlessly. However, only about 10% of deaf children have deaf parents. More commonly the deaf child is born into a hearing family. These hearing parents usually use a communication system in which spoken words are supported simultaneously with signs. Such a sign system differs considerably from a sign language as it is not a natural language. Deaf children of hearing parents (DCHP) come into contact with sign language when they go to a school for the deaf. Research indicates that DCHP do acquire sign language structures, but this acquisition is delayed (Knoors, 1992).In this study a description of the development of morpho-syntactic and lexical aspects of the Sign Language of the Netherlands is given. The sign language production of three DCDP is analysed every six months from 1;0 to 3;6. Furthermore, the sign language production of three DCHP at the age of 3;6 is compared with that of the DCDP at the same age. The study includes both general measures such as Mean Length of Utterance and Type/Token Ratio and aspects specific to sign languages such as the use of POINTS in two sign combinations. Recommendations will be made with respect to the improvement of observational research on language acquision of DCDP and DCHP.

Traditionally, transitive verbs are divided into two separate classes: obligatory and optional transitives. If no rules or principles are assumed to underly this distinction, when learning this, children must proceed on a verb-by-verb basis. Acquisition data of seven children show that it is very unlikely that children indeed proceed in such a way. I propose a unified analysis of transitivity in which objects are obligatory when the utterance denotes a Specific Event, i.e. a specific instance of the verb. When the utterance does not denote a Specific Event, the object is optional. Object appearance is then governed by lexico-pragmatic principles. I argue that the acquisition data is more easily compatible with the proposed analysis, and that the data show that children distinguish between Specific Events and other cases of verb use with respect to the occurrence of objects.

Sanders, Spooren and Noordman (1992) provide a classification of coherence relations that is based on four primitives. These primitives are claimed to have a psychological status, in that hearers and speakers use their knowledge of these primitives to infer the right coherence relation between two clauses.The order in which children acquire coherence relations provides a test base for the classification: the classification predicts that negative causal relations are the most complex and that children therefore acquire these relations later than any of the others.This hypothesis was investigated in an experiment with 8- and 11-year-old children. In one task the children had to infer the right relation, in another task the children had to produce the right relation. Negative causal relations were compared with negative additive and positive causal relations. The items were constructed with nonsense words to eliminate the factor of world knowledge. In several respects the negative causal relation turned out to be the most complex.

For some 25 years now, ethnic minorities in the Netherlands have been offered the possibility to receive Minority Language and Culture Teaching (MLCT). This paper provides an overview of the policy developments with regard to MLCT. It takes a closer look at the arguments in favour of MLCT, on which that policy is based; the arguments against MLCT in reply to this are also presented. Empirical research results are summarized to explain that the practical conditions under which MLCT has to be organized are not favourable. Within this framework the results of evaluation studies carried out in the Netherlands into MLCT are discussed. Partly on the basis of these results, a number of advisory committees appointed by the government have in recent years come up with various recommendations with regard to the future of MLCT. The conclusion is that this future is not a very optimistic one.

The research which is reported in this paper concerns the knowledge of certain 'collocations' of adult learners of Dutch as a second language.The term collocation refers to a sequence of lexical items which habitually co-occur and which have a kind of semantic cohesion (Cruse, 1986). In my research I look at one specific collocation, that is the one between an article, an adjective and a substantive. Moreover, the adjective must have a context-specific meaning. This type of collocation is called a strong collocation. An example is a heavy drinker.I believe that the knowledge of strong collocations is important for second language learners in the process of fully acquiring the second language and of acquiring a native-speakerlike competence.I developed a receptive and a productive test to measure the knowledge of collocations of learners of Dutch as a second language. Furthermore I examined educational methods on the appearance and use of collocations.It turns out that Newmarks (1982) statement that "A foreigner appears to go on making collocational mistakes however long he lives in his adopted country" can be affirmed.

In this article we addres the question of whether, and to what exetent, noun gender attribution in languages such as French, German and Dutch can be formulated in terms of- semantic morphonological rules- competing semantic and morphonological cues- arbitrary idiosyncratic featuresIn addressing this question we carried two learning experiments in which adult subjects, native speakers of Dutch and nonnative second language learners of Dutch, had to learn pseudo Dutch nouns. Our attempt was to provide some counter-evidence to falsify some claims Caroll (1989) made. In Caroll's view, L1 learners of French encode noun gender as an inherent feature of the noun in an obligatory fashion whereas English learners of French learn nouns as words distinct from their determiners.We argue, from the evidence we provide in our study, that the learning of gender values are equally difficult (or easy) for young native speakers, older native speakers, and nonnative speakers when these values are arbitrary. However, when learning the nonarbitrary gender values, it is easier for older native speakers to encode gender of nouns because they have already acquired many nouns from which cues or rules can be derived.

The purpose of this research was to find out how Turkish and Moroccan adults make compositions in Dutch and what role the mothertongue plays in forming these. To collect data a vocabularytest was developed. The results showed that Turks and Moroccans form compositions in a significantly different way. They seem to follow the preferences of their mothertongue in both the choice of the construction (composition versus definition) and the order of Head and specifier whithin that construction. Turks form mostly specifier - Head compositions, Moroccans more often make definitions, and uniquely make Head - specifier compositions.The influence of the mothertongue is obvious but not easy to describe. The Moroccans experience negative influence expressed by interference. Whith the Turks the influence of the mothertongue is less visible, because they experience positive transfer, leading to facilitation.

For this study we used data collected within the framework of the European Science Foundation Project on second language acquistion by immigrants. Data from the core informants, two Moroccan and two Turkish learners of Dutch, were analyzed. In the work on the acquistion of word order published by Klein and Perdue, a functional perspective was taken. In this study the analyses are carried out from a structural perspective: the principles and parameters model. This has several advantages:phenomena below the level of the utterances can be analyzed;lexical and functional categories can play a role in the acquisition process;parallels can be drawn between nominal and verbal phrases;the important role of the source language appears (contradicting the conclusi-ons drawn by Klein and Perdue). An acquisition process in four steps is outlined relating to which part of the syntactic tree is activated and which part not yet. In the third phase functional categories play an important role: they force the L2 learners to model their L2 utterances for a major part on the structure of their L1. This is expressed in creative constructions as the title exhibits. Restructuring occurs mainly in the last stage but this is reached by hardly any of the ESF informants.

In this paper we report on the acquisition of verb placement in L2 Dutch by one Moroccan and one Turkish subject. The data originate from a three-year lon-gitudinal research project on spontaneous second language acquisition by adult immigrants which was financed by the European Science Foundation.After describing the routes the two L2 Dutch learners followed in their acquisition of verb placement, we compare our results with those obtained in the project entitled "Zweitspracherwerb italienischer und spanischer Arbeiter" on the acquisition of L2 German word order (the ZISA project). As the results of this project are relevant to our research in view of the structural similarities between Dutch and German, we began by trying to establish whether our data could be described in terms of the developmental sequence in the acquisition of word order in L2 German proposed by the ZISA group. The conclusion is that the implicational scale proposed by the ZISA group does not emerge from the data from our subjects. Neither can their acquisition of verb placement in L2 Dutch be explained in terms of the processing strategies suggested by the ZISA researchers. Instead we would like to suggest that the learners' preferences are attributable to the combined influence of source and target languages.

Recently several research groups that are concerned with language acquisition have claimed, that suprasegmental information contributes to the learnability of natural languages. Specifically, it is claimed, that suprasegmentals enable the language learner to perceive and distinguish linguistic patterns in the stream of speech (Morgan et al, 1987; Mehler et al, 1988; Hirsch-PAsek, 1987). It has been shown, that suprasegmentals are immediately accessable to babies and require no learning process. This finding is compatible with psychological research that has shown, that the sensoric system of babies structures perception immediately after birth (see Van Geert, 1983 for an overview).The present study deals with the use of suprasegmentals in adult second language learners. For several reasons it may be wondered whether adults have the same benefit from suprasegmentals like newborns. Therefore an experiment is conducted in order to investigate the ability of adult second language learners to distinguish several stress-patterns in Dutch. Several stress-patterns in two- and three syllabic words were investigated. The results indicate, that both groups of second language learners use a lexical and a perceptual strategy, that in the case of Level 1 students leads to a confusion of perceptual and lexical strategies, whereas Level Π students appear to seperate these strategies in a more appropriate way. The results are discussed in the perspective of language teaching. It is concluded, that the development of perceptual strategies need more attention in the classroom, since they might enable the student more effectively to explore a second language in communicative situations.

The research described in this article tried to validate a framework designed for determining the degree of difficulty of a reading comprehension test. This system is primarily based on the characteristics of the texts included in the test. The results of the research show that in fact most of the text-criteria implied in the framework (interest of the topic, familiarity, concreteness, density, structural transparency, explicitness) were good predictors of the actual difficulty of the reading com-prehension test. However, in some cases, it was concluded that, besides the set of text-criteria, the nature of the reading task should also be implied in the determination of the degree of difficulty of the test. A supplementary text-criterion, i.e. linguistic means, was found to be a valuable predictor, which leads us to conclude that this one should be added to the framework somehow.

In this article it is argued that the discussion about the effects of cognates on the acquisition of vocabulary should not be limited to cognatepairs in L1 and L2, but should also take into account the possible knowledge of cognates in other languages. Beginning students of Italian L2 scored equally well in the interpretation of Italian words with cognates in Dutch and English as in the interpretation of Italian words with cognates in English but not in Dutch.Between students without any knowledge of Italian and students with some minimal knowledge ('a holiday in Italy') there was a signficant difference in the number of correctly interpreted words. Since the words had a low frequency rate, the difference is attributed to a greater awareness of Italian wordform in general. This implies that awareness of morphological regularities is formed in the initial stages of the acquisition process and is actively used in interpretation of words.Transparancy is also a factor in the interpretation of new words. The results seem to confirm the hypothesis that cognates in which Italian morphology determines only the ending of the word are easier to recognise than words with discrepancies in stem and ending.

The Dutch preposition door can be translated with through (typically in adverbial clauses of time/place) or by (typically as a marker for the passive agent and the causee). The choice between these two seems at first sight not to be very difficult for Dutch learners of English. This should come as no surprise if we assume — along with more traditional semantic descriptions of door — that there are two homonymous door's. However, we would like to propose that there is only one, polysemous door. After briefly looking at theoretical evidence from cognitive semantics for this proposal, we discuss experimental evidence from learners' translations of door. The results of the experiment show that the translation of door is not as easy as could have been expected. Indeed, when learners translate door as if there were two door's, they run into interesting difficulties. This seems to suggest that (1) learners would benefit from treating door as one, polysemous word and (2) that (theories of) (foreign) language learning and teaching could benefit from cognitive semantic insights.

Slips of the tongue in L1 speech have been widely studied in detail as they can provide evidence about particular aspects of the speech production process and, in the case of slips produced by children, about language development. However, until now very little research has been done on slips of the tongue in L2 learner speech production, even though L2 slips might well provide evidence of the language development of L2 learners. In this paper I would like to present the results of a part of my MA thesis, in which I investigated whether claims about slips of the tongue in L1 speech production are also valid for L2 learner speech, and what they mean for the language development of L2 learners.