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Toegepaste Taalwetenschap in Artikelen - Volume 55, Issue 1, 1996
Volume 55, Issue 1, 1996
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Natural Phonology and Second Language Acquisition: Problems and Consequences
Author(s): Niclas Abrahamssonpp.: 9–21 (13)More LessThis paper looks at whether Natural Phonology can be directly applied to second language acquisition. First, the original theory, as presented by Stampe and Donegan in the 1970s, is outlined. Secondly, its application to first language acquisition is presented, as this is highly crucial for the following discussion on the naturalness of second language phonology. Thirdly, an attempt is made to establish a preliminary model of the application to second language speech.Findings indicate that Natural Phonology is able to, if not resolve, then at least shed some light on a controversial issue in second language research, namely the distinction between interference and development. With the dichotomy of processes vs. rules offered by Natural Phonology, and hence the interpretation of deviations in second language research as the result of failure of suppression and limitation of processes (instead of as the result of interference from LI phonological rules), the interference/ development distinction collapses. In addition, a principle of closest phonetic value' is postulated in order to explain substitutional variation across learners with differing LI backgrounds.Although highly promising, application of Natural Phonology to second language issues also raises inherent problems in the original theory that need to be resolved. Instead of the notions of innateness and latency of processes proposed by Stampean Natural Phonology, in this paper, suggestions are made concerning the brain's early programming of processes in the form of a model which covers both first and second language acquisition.
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Self-Disclosure and Safe Topics of Conversation: A Cross-Cultural Appraisal
Author(s): Margo van Betteraij, Eric Kellerman and Erik Schilspp.: 35–46 (12)More LessStudies of the pragmatic aspects of second language acquisition and use (and particularly speech acts) have been rapidly growing in number and quality over the last few years. Such studies are particularly relevant from both theoretical and applied perspectives, but while we seem to know a fair amount about how non-native speakers and native speakers apologise, compliment, complain, refuse and criticise, we seem to know almost nothing about what constitute safe topics for strangers from different cultures to actually talk about to each other ('small talk', one might say).Since it is natural for Westerners to talk about themselves to casual strangers cross-cultural differences in both willingness to 'self-disclose' and the content of self-disclosure might have significant consequences for the success of ongoing interpersonal communication. Yet comparative studies of interculturally safe topics are restricted to McHugh's work on Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai and American nationals.For our own study, we used the Jourard Self Disclosure Questionnaire to examine the willingness to self-disclose of groups of Dutch, English, and Japanese students to imagined 'middling acquaintances', fellow-students of either gender with the same linguistic and cultural background and with whom they had friendly but non-intimate relationships. Sixty questions are divided into six categories, such as Body, Money, and Personality. Results for the Dutch group show clear patterns of cross-gender differences, some of which are at variance with those found in previously published research on Americans. For instance, in our data, male subjects disclose significantly more than females. However, while the gender of the conversation partner does not have an influence on the degree of male disclosure, it does have an impact on the disclosure of female subjects. Women disclose significantly more to women than they do to men. Comparable data from our English and Japanese subjects are reported.
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First Language Attrition in Russian Immigrants: Focus on the Lexicon
Author(s): Zhanna Feldmanpp.: 47–62 (16)More LessThe present study of individual language attrition (LA) attempts to combine social an psychological aspects in an examination of lexical processing. The data are based on loss of language skills by Russian speaking immigrants who had been in Israel from 5 to 20 years. All had acquired Russian as their native language and were literate in Russian upon arrival.Three data collection sessions were conducted in the participants' homes. Session 1 (spontaneous conversation) investigated each of four sociological domains: home, work/school, religion and immigration experience. Spontaneous conversation served as a source of information about the subjects as well as indication of their LA. Markers of attrition (pauses, code-switching, hesitations, circumlocutions) served as a basis for developing the tasks in two additional sessions (i.e. semantic opposites, hyponyms, picture naming, Tip-of-the-Tongue (TOT) phenomenon, etc.).The paper reports on data from several tasks, with a particular focus on: semantic opposites and Tip-of-the-Tongue (TOT) phenomena. For TOT, the speaker does not recall the target item, but does recall words of similar form and/or meaning. TOT was notes for low and middle frequency lexical items, with individual differences found between:1. substitution of a different word for the intended word, usually accompanied by immediate apprehension of the error by the speaker;2. circumlocution, i.e. when the inaccessible item is replaced by a definition and/or metalinguistic comments regarding its use. (For example, instead of the Russian equivalent of 'peacock' the following utterance: 'Well, a colourful bird, I forgot...');3. neologisms based on morphology.Findings are discussed in terms of an emerging processing model of LA based on Levelt's production model. The accessing process is parcelled into several sub-processes: full comprehension, successful seleaion of an appropriate lexical item from the mental lexion, after which there is a failure to access phonological encoding of that item in the appropriate language.
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Gesture as a Communication Strategy in Learners of French and Swedish
Author(s): Marianne Gullbergpp.: 63–73 (11)More LessThree native speakers of Swedish learning French and three native speakers of French learning Swedish were asked to retell a cartoon both in their first and second language, and their use of gesture as a communication strategy was investigated. The quantitative difference between the NNS groups was found to be due to different proficiency levels rather than to the influence of LI, since no quantitative difference could be found in gesture use between the NSs of French and NS of Swedish. All speakers used more gestures per clause as NNSs, but the type of gestures used and their distribution was very similar across Lis. All NNSs use iconic and metaphoric gestures to compensate for lexical deficits, exploiting and illustrating features of the referent. Attempts to manage discourse result in deictic gestures to establish explicit co-reference and coherence. The same gestural behaviour could be found in all NSs, again irrespective of LI. It is suggested that the difference between strategic behaviour in LI and L2 is mainly a matter of degree.
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Examining the Processability Theory: The Case of Adjective Agreement in L2 Swedish
Author(s): Björn Hammarbergpp.: 75–88 (14)More LessThe Processability Theory (PT), originating from the German ZISA Project and recently revised by Pienemann (1993, in prep.), claims that the order of grammatical development in a second language is determined by a hierarchy of psycholinguistic constraints on the processability of grammatical structures. The present paper discusses some problematic aspects of this theory and argues for a dynamic view of L2 acquisition in which factors which drive acquisition ahead are also taken into account. It is suggested that a Principle of Perceived Communicative Value (PCV) plays a part in conditioning the order of L2 development. The relative role of processability and communicative value factors is investigated here in a case where they compete.The acquisition of adjective agreement in L2 Swedish is chosen as a test case to examine predictions about the order of development derived from PT and PCV. This permits the comparison of a phrasal (NP) and inter-phrasal (subject-predicative) syntactic domain as well as the comparison of different morphological categories (gender and number). Longitudinal data are gathered from a corpus of conversations with six adult learners reflecting successive stages of development for each individual from the beginning stage to an advanced level.The results indicate that the nature of the morphological category is decisive in determining acquisition order, which means that PCV is effective and overrules PT in those cases where the two are in conflict. On the other hand, if the same morpho-logical category is compared in different syntactic domains, PTs prediction that phrasal agreement comes before inter-phrasal agreement is borne out. This suggests that the two principles of processability and communicative relevance interact, and that a theory of processability is neither sufficient nor invalid, but needs to be placed in the context of a wider model of L2 development. It lends support to the dynamic view of L2 acquisition discussed in the paper.
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Language Mixing in a French-Dutch Bilingual Child
Author(s): Aafke Hulk and Elisabeth van der Lindenpp.: 89–101 (13)More LessChild bilingualism has been a domain of growing interest in the last few years. A central question in research concerns the differentiation of the two languages in the developmen-tal process: do children develop two separate language systems from the very beginning or do they start with a combined system? In this discussion, aspects of word order play an essential role. Radford (1986) has compared early child utterances with so called "small clauses". In small clauses, word order would be relatively free due to the fact that children have not yet acquired the concept of case marking which puts constraints on word order. In this assumption, word order would not be expected to be differen-tiated in the first stages of the two languages of the bilingual child. Others however (Meisel, 1989, Frijn & de Haan 1994) have suggested that word order from the two-word stage on is almost invariably correct and in line with parameter settings in the adult language.At first sight, the utterances of the French-Dutch bilingual child that we study do not support one or the other of these two views unambiguously. Despite the fact that French is a head initial, SVO language and that the majority of the utterances of the child are in accordance with this parameter setting, utterances with SOV order and other Dutch-like word orders do appear in her French with a certain frequency. In our discussion we will show that, while the early (S)OV patterns can probably be explained by the absence of a fully fledged functional projection IP in the child's grammar, this cannot account for these patterns in later phases. The persistent presence of OV patterns in the French utterances - that are (although very rarely) encountered in French monolingual children as well - seems to be caused, then, by the continuing Dutch input that may very well be the factor that "pushes up" the production of [XP V] patterns in the child's French.
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The Development of Pragmatic Competence
Author(s): Gabriele Kasperpp.: 103–120 (18)More LessUnlike other areas of second language study, which are primarily concerned with acquisitional patterns of interlanguage knowledge over time, most studies in inter-language pragmatics have focused on second language use rather than second language learning. The aim of this talk is to profile interlanguage pragmatics as an area of inquiry in second language acquisition research, by reviewing existing studies with a focus on learning, examining research findings in interlanguage pragmatics that shed light on some basic questions in SLA, exploring cognitive and social-psychological theories that might offer explanations of different aspeas of pragmatic development, and proposing a research agenda for the study of interlanguage pragmatics with a developmental perspective that will tie it more closely to other areas of SLA.
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Towards an Ecology of Second Language Acquisition: Sla as a Socialization Process
Author(s): Gabriele Pallottipp.: 121–134 (14)More LessRecent work in second language acquisition research has seen a renewed interest in 'external factors' affecting the acquisition process. However, few studies have adressed the question of how the interactional features of the social context in which naturalistic learning takes place, can influence second language development. The research presented in this paper is an attempt to fill this gap, in applying a 'language socialization' (Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986) perspective on non-instructed second language acquisition. The subject of the study is a Moroccan five-year- old girl, who was videotaped in an ethnographic study of her acquisition of Italian as a second language. This approach allowed to collect data both on the girl's linguistic development and on the socio-interactional environment in which it took place. It was thus possible to investigate the systematic relationships between interlanguage and its context of acquisition.This preliminary investigation focuses on three different language levels. The first is the lexicon: the very first words learned by the girl can be shown to have a particular relevance for the nursery school's communicative economy. The second area of investigation is morphology. Here, too, one can see how some of the first grammatical morphemes acquired, diminutives and superlatives, played a role in facilitating the learner's socialization. Finally, an examination of how syntactic structures were initially produced, shows that sentence construction was influenced by the interactional needs of the speaker in a particular communicative context. It is argued that all these aspects of second language acquisition can -at least partially - be explained by reference to the socio-cultural context of learning. Given the importance recently attributed to interaction as one of the most powerful determinants of naturalistic second language acquisition, it is suggested that the study of the sociolinguistic environment - or the 'ecology' of second language acquisition - is a profitable direction for future research.
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Pre-Basic Varieties: The First Stages of Second Language Acquisition
Author(s): Clive Perduepp.: 135–149 (15)More LessThree of the traditional questions in (second) language acquisition research are:1. What is acquired, in what order?2. How is it acquired?3. Why is it acquired?In this paper, I concentrate on (1) and (3), proposing a description of various learners' paths towards various L2s, and examining different factors which may explain the course of acquisition. The learners were, for the most part, recorded during the European Science Foundation's study of the spontaneous (untutored) acquisition of Dutch, French, English and German (Perdue 1993); other comparable studies will also be discussed. The emphasis is placed on the beginning stages of acquisition in an attempt to demonstrate that these stages are crucial for an understanding of the whole process. It will be argued (a) that there are stages (grammars) through which all learners pass, (b) that these stages can be characterised explicitly, but (c) the description of these stages, and of the transition between them, is not reducible to a single-level analysis, and (d) distance between (source and target) language pairs partially determines the amount of useful knowledge available to the absolute beginner.
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Models of Second Language Production
Author(s): Nanda Poulissepp.: 151–159 (9)More LessThe article discusses to what extent bilingual models of speech production can account for the fact that L2 speakers are generally, but not always, able to select LI words when speaking the LI and L2 words when speaking the L2. After a brief discussion of word selection in monolingual models of speech production, two bilingual models are presented. In one of these, LI and L2 systems form separate subsets which are activated in their entirety. In the other one there is only one network containing both LI and L2 items, and the language feature plays a role in activating individual lexical items. It is argued that the second representation has the advantage of being more efficient, because it allows one to explain the selection of a single LI word to be used in L2 speech without having to activate the entire LI system. The first model cannot give an efficient explanation for the language switches violating the matching principle proposed by Bierwisch & Schreuder (1993), which entails that a lemma is selected only if it includes all and only those of the semantic features contained in the chunk to be lexicalized. The article also addresses the chunking problem. Since there is no one-to-one correspondence between concepts and words, speakers need to cut up their messages into lexicalizable chunks. It is suggested that both LI and L2 speakers may follow an informed trial-and-error procedure based on their experiences with language(s) involved. Since there is no look-ahead, speakers do occasionally rum into lexical problems. In view of the matching principle, the only way to solve these problems is to go through the processes of conceptualization and chunking again.
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Crosslinguistic Influence and the Expression of Hypothetical Meaning
Author(s): Edith Schoutenpp.: 161–174 (14)More LessAlthough Dutch learners of English generally achieve high levels of proficiency, even advanced students produce errors like the following:English Dutch*Ifshe would do that, I would leave her (Als zij dat zou doen, zou ik hij haar weg-gaan) instead of: If she did that, I would leave her (Als zij dat deed, zou ik bij haar weggaan)They tend to insert would in the ¿/^clause of hypothetical sentences. This type of error is a characteristic feature of Dutch English and in many cases it has become fossilized. The following questions present themselves:Why is it exactly this error which is so persistent while other aspects of grammar are acquired much more easily?To what extent does the mother tongue influence the fossilization process and to what extent do general principles like markedness and semantic disambiguation play a role?Dutch corpus data show that although the structural equivalent of both the correct and the incorrect structures above are perfectly acceptable in Dutch, one form is often highlyy preferred over the other, depending on factors like time frame (future/present/past), clause order and nature of the verb (strong/weak). On the basis of these facts, I will provide a thorough description of hypothetical conditionals, which serves as a starting point for my research.In order to gain more insight into the mother tongue in the fossilization process, a written test was administered to Dutch learners of English with different levels of proficiency, first in Dutch and a couple of weeks later in English. The learners had to fill in the verb forms in hypothetical conditional sentences embedded in a short situation description.The results showed that the distribution of the different forms in Dutch was to a large extent mirrored in English; i.e. where in Dutch the would equivalent was used, the number of if...would errors increased in English and where a past tense in the if-clause was favoured η Dutch, fewer mistakes were made in English. Apparently crosslinguistic influence does play a role here and the fossilization of if ..would seems to be limited only to a subset of conditional types.
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The Growth of Linguistic Knowledge and Language Processing in Undergraduate Learners of French
Author(s): Richard J. Towellpp.: 175–186 (12)More LessIn this article it is argued first that linguistic knowledge consists of two components, linguistic competence and learned linguistic knowledge, and that these components are created in the mind of the second language learner by different processes. It is further argued that these two kinds of knowledge must be stored in the mind as proceduralised knowledge, through a process of automatization or proceduralisation, in order to permit fluent language processing. Using evidence gathered from undergraduate learners of French, these two hypotheses are investigated. The acquisition of competence is investigated through grammaticality judgement tests, the acquisition of proceduralised knowledge is investigated through the measurement of temporal variables. In relation to the acquisition of linguistic competence, the results suggest that learners do not re-set parameters even after a lengthy period of exposure to the L2, but that they may mimic the L2 on the basis of the LI. In relation to the proceduralisation of linguistic knowledge, the results suggest that learners do not possess the L2 knowledge in the same way as the LI knowledge but that specific aspects of the knowledge are proceduralised over time. It is expected that further investigation of the data set will enable more detailed statements about exactly what kind of knowledge has been acquired and proceduralised and what has not.
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Le Traitement Prototypique: Définition et Implications
Author(s): Marzena Watorekpp.: 187–200 (14)More LessThis paper presents results from a study of the language production of native speakers and advanced learners. Four groups often speakers (native French, native Italian, Italian learners of French, French learners of Italian) performed a picture description task, and a comparison was made between the information contained in the productions of natives vs. learners, and the linguistic means used to convey this information.It was found that the processing of identical chunks of information ranged along a continuum from the analytic to the synthetic, from learners to natives, respectively. Two examples of this differential processing are discussed in detail: firstly, the division of the discourse into main structure and side structure, and secondly, the locating of entities in the picture. The former distinction emerges much more clearly in learner than in native production, and for the latter function, learners resort more frequently than native speakers to temporal adverbs such as puis/più and particles such as aussi/anche, in addition to purely spatial means.Overall, it is shown that learners have a more neutral way of processing the task (Von Strutterheim's "prototypische Bearbeitung"), and it is argued in conclusion that it is precisely this charactristic of learner production which allows insights into both the structure of (descriptive) discourse and the language production process.
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How are Lexical-Semantic Differences Represented in L2 Syntax? A Study of the Unaccusative/Unergative Distinction in L2 Chinese
Author(s): Boping Yuanpp.: 201–215 (15)More LessIt has been proposed that intransitive verbs can be divided into two subgroups, unaccusative verbs, such as break and arrive, and unergative verbs, such as laugh and swim. The former type has an internal argument, but no external one, whereas the latter type has an external argument but no internal one. Unaccusative verbs are verbs of change of state or location, while unergative verbs are a set of agentive monadic verbs including verbs of manner of motion. In English, the internal argument of the unaccusative verb has to move to subject position to be Case-marked. In Chinese, however, the internal argument can remain in object position and get inherent partitive Case as long as it is an indefinite NP. External arguments of unergative verbs in both English and Chinese are in preverbal position whether they are definite or indefinite. The study reported in this paper was aimed at finding out whether the lexical-semantic distinction between the unaccusative verb and the unergative verb could be properly represented in English-speaking learners' L2 syntax of Chinese and whether the learner would only allow the single argument of the unaccusative verb but disallow that of the unergative verb to be in object position. The results indicate that the unaccusative/unergative distinction is acquired very late by English-speaking learners, and that the acquisition does not proceed in a linear fashion.
Volumes & issues
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Volume 86 (2011)
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Volume 84 (2010)
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Volume 83 (2010)
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Volume 84-85 (2010)
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Volume 82 (2009)
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