Toegepaste Taalwetenschap in Artikelen - Volume 73, Issue 1, 2005

Numerous studies have investigated the persuasive effects of different evidence types as support for claims in persuasive messages, but little attention has been paid to the preference that people have for these evidence types. In Hornikx (2003), expert evidence, which relies on the expert's confirmation of the claim, was more frequently used in French than in Dutch persuasive information brochures. As text writers are professionals, experienced in designing persuasive texts, their preferences for evidence types may differ from those of lay people. In order to test whether this cultural difference also applies to lay people, 174 Dutch and French students were given claims supported by evidence, and were asked to rank the evidence types in function of their preference. Two subtle cross-cultural differences appeared: the French put expert evidence more frequently in the first position, and ranked it more frequently before statistical evidence, which was the most preferred evidence type in both groups.

The development of the Internet has set up a brand new text form, the so-called digital conversations. With computer programmes like MSN Messenger, it is possible to communicate electronically with friends and relatives. These chat conversations contain both oral and literate characteristics; in this sense, the digital texts represent a kind of hybrid language form. To determine the position of the digital texts amongst their oral and written counterparts, it is necessary to create an overview of the stylistic relations between these three contemporary genres. Within the current study, I have compared the usage of the Dutch language within MSN-conversations, e-mails, and transcribed telephone conversations on the basis of several linguistic-stylistic dimensions. It turned out that there were eight of these components on which significant stylistic differences exist between the three modes. An important finding is that e-mails have an informational structure, in contrast to the telephone conversations, that are characterized by a highly involved style; within the digital conversations these two styles are mixed. On two other dimensions, the MSN-conversations distinguish themselves from both the written and oral modes by an increased use of popular or minimising expressions and time references.

In two experiments, we investigated how words with cross-linguistic overlap in orthography and/or phonology are recognized by bilinguals. Dutch-English bilinguals performed an English visual lexical decision task including words that are spelled and/or pronounced the same in English and Dutch. Earlier studies by Dijkstra et al (1999) and Lemhöfer & Dijkstra (2004) showed seemingly contradictory results. For example, in the first study, homophones were reacted to significantly more slowly, whereas homophones produced facilitation in the second study. However, the previous studies had problems with the frequency distribution of the stimuli and the control conditions. Therefore, the experimental design was improved in Experiments 1 and 2 in order to find out how interlingual homographs are recognized by bilinguals and what the influence is of orthographic and phonological overlap. Experiment 1, with homographs with only orthographic overlap and homographs with both orthographic and phonological overlap, partly replicated results found by Dijkstra et al. and Lemhöfer & Dijkstra, but did not show the null-effect for homographs with both orthographic and phonological overlap. Because the major difference between the three studies was stimulus list composition, Experiment 2 tested whether a change in stimulus list composition influenced the reaction times to interlingual homographs. Experiment 2 included homographs with both orthographic and phonological overlap and homophones. In this experiment, homophones produced a null-effect and the homographs were reacted to significantly more slowly than control words. The results imply that a change in stimulus list composition influences reaction times to interlingual homographs, because it can induce different types of participant strategies.

The paper addresses the issue of a possible relationship between the acquisition of non-modal auxiliaries and the acquisition of syntactic phenomena in an L2. It has been claimed in the literature that the acquisition of non-modal auxiliaries enables learners to acquire syntactic phenomena such as post-verbal negation (cf. Parodi, 2000; Dimroth, 2004) and syntactic finiteness (Dimroth et al., 2003; Jordens, 2004). The present paper aims to make a contribution to this line of research by investigating the role of hebben in the acquisition of certain V2 phenomena in L2 Dutch. More specifically, it seeks to answer the question of whether the production of hebben by Turkish and Moroccan learners of Dutch is related to these learners' acquisition of topicalisation and post-verbal negation.An exploratory study is described in which longitudinal production data are examined both quantitatively and qualitatively. The data are taken from the ESF-corpus (cf. Feldweg, 1992) and concern interview data and film retellings from two Turkish and three Moroccan learners who learned Dutch in a naturalistic setting.The data show that all five learners fail to produce topicalised structures and post-verbal negations as long as they do not produce hebben. Moreover, learners start to produce such V2 structures shortly after they have produced their first instances of hebben. These findings seem to indicate that the production of hebben is related to the acquisition of topicalisation and post-verbal negation, i.e., the non-modal auxiliary seems to serve as a bootstrap into the V2 system of Dutch.To explain the observed relationship between hebben and V2 phenomena, an explanation by Jordens (2004) is considered. It is concluded that the present data are in line with his account. It is also stressed, however, that some caution is needed in interpreting the findings, due to the exploratory character of the study.

In inter-Scandinavian communication, participants usually speak their mother tongues, accepting certain comprehension problems, but not expecting those problems to lead to a break down in communication. People often tend to apply convergent accommodation strategies, such as a slightly lower speech rate, a more distinct pronunciation, or avoidance of words known to be difficult to understand. This paper takes a look at the effects of comprehension understanding of Swedish in Denmark when accommodation strategies are used. In an experiment, comprehension of four Swedish texts was tested under the following conditions: (A0) no accommodation, (Al) (use of one) accommodation strategy, (A2) a combination of two strategies, and (A3) a combination of three strategies. Results show a moderate increase in comprehension between A0 and Al, Al and A2/A3 and a robust (significant) increase between (A0) and A2/A3. This effect, however, does not depend on hearers' perception of accommodation and must therefore be explained by objective criteria, such as the rise in processing time following from a lower speech rate. No effect of accommodation was seen between A2 and A3. This means that the maximum effect of accommodation is reached when speakers use a combination of two different accommodation strategies.

Ethnolects can be defined as language varieties determined by ethnicity. The ethnolect is especially attributed to the descendants of immigrants. This variety emerges from a language shift situation and takes over the symbolic function from the original language as a marker of ethnicity. The features of ethnolects can be explained by processes involving second language acquisition and bilingualism, namely interlanguage and transfer from the original language.The Moroccan ethnolect in Nijmegen is distinguished primarily by phonological and morphosyntactical features and less by the lexicon. Most of the phonological features can be explained as transfer from Moroccan Arabic and Tarifit Berber. The morphosyntactic and lexical features are due to acquisition processes. There is also an influence from the Nijmegen city dialect on the ethnolect, mainly in pronunciation.

This article deals with two key issues in discourse studies. First, to what extent is there a correspondence in the labelling of coherence relations? Second, to what extent are coherence relations judged as semantic or pragmatic? In an experiment, it was examined how actual readers interpret the relation between utterances, by presenting them with sets of utterances which contained both a semantic and a pragmatic relation. It was concluded that the correspondence in labelling was high and that in most cases the respondents chose the intended label. The majority of the respondents judged the relations either semantic or pragmatic, in the course of which most relations were evaluated as predominantly semantic. Moreover, readers judged a relation more semantic when the text contained factual information or portrayed a situation outside the speaker's control. The relation is more pragmatic when the credibility of the utterances is dubious or when utterances are unverifiable.

The use of gestures during "normal" speech production is well investigated and understood. In contrast, little systematic research has been carried out to examine gesture behaviour during non-fluent aphasie speech production, which is characterized by considerable anomia and hesitations. However, by comparing gesture behaviour during fluent, hesitant, and anomie speech, gesture research in aphasia can provide insight into a more general question: the nature of the interaction between verbal and manual expression. Furthermore, such research can help to evaluate the usefulness of therapy methods that try to stimulate verbal communication through nonverbal action. In this study, gesture behaviour (type, quantity, synchrony, handedness and function) related to speech production was examined and a comparison made between a male aphasie and a healthy counterpart. The collected data were separated into three different levels of fluency and then categorized according to McNeill's system, with additional features specific to anomie gesture behaviour. A comparison of the behaviour of the two informants reveals that there is no significant difference in their gestures during fluent speech production, Clear similarities were also observed in the two modes during hesitant speech production. With respect to anomia, the results of this study suggest that gestures do not have a compensatory or facilitative function. Consequently, it is questionable whether word retrieval during anomia can be prompted by nonverbal stimulation.

It is generally acknowledged, that in vocabulary learning and teaching, the main important factors are frequency, meaningful context, and variation in input. Within the last factor, some researchers stress the importance of hierarchical relations between words (paradigmatic relations as in animal - bird - craw), considering these relations essential for network building and vocabulary learning by children. Others believe they are just as important as associative (syntagmatic) relations between words. The findings of the research reported in this article (a curriculum intervention study) show that treatment with explicitly learned hierarchical relations (e.g., by visualisations of relations between words in a tree diagram) have the same effect on vocabulary learning as exercises focussed on associative, syntagmatic relations only.

The present research addressed the question: "Is there a relationship between individual differences in aptitude for processing musical information and individual differences in aptitude for processing linguistic information?" An extensive exploration of linguistic and musical theory, aptitude studies, and the literature on the processing of language and music, led the author to believe that a relationship between linguistic and musical forms of aptitude could be found in aspects of working memory. Four tests were designed to measure an individual's working memory spans for linguistic and musical processing. The results of 70 participants from a secondary school on these tests and on a French listening examination were compared. Significant correlations were indeed found between the scores on these five measures. Furthermore, the complexity of the information to be processed, the musical experience of the participants and other factors were found to have an effect on correlations. Especially at higher levels of processing, musical and linguistic processing capacity seem to be associated. No definitive conclusions could be drawn, among other thing because of the 1OW reliability of two of the tests, but the results do encourage further research into this relatively new area in second language acquisition.