The development of sentence-interpretation strategies in monolingual German-learning children with and without specific language impairment

Previous research on sentence comprehension conducted with German-learning children has concentrated on the role of case marking and word order in typically developing children. This paper compares, the performance of German-learning children with language impairment (age 4-6 years) and without language impairment (aged 2-6, 8-9 years) in two experiments that systematically vary the cues animacy, case marking; word-order, and subject-verb agreement. The two experiments differ with regard to the choice of case marking: in the first it is distinct but in the second it is neutralized. The theoretical framework is the competition model developed by Bates and Mac Whinney and their collaborators, a variant of the parallel distributed processing models. It is hypothesized that children of either population first appreciate the cue animacy that can be processed locally, that is, "on the spot," before they turn to more distributed cues leading ultimately up to subject-verb agreement, which presupposes the comparison of various constituents before an interpretation can be established. Thus agreement is more "costly" in processing than animacy or the (more) local cue initial NP. In experiment I with unambiguous case markers it is shown that the typically developing children proceed from animacy to the nominative (predominantly in coalition with the initial NP) to agreement, while in the second experiment with ambiguous case markers these children turn from animacy to the initial NP and then to agreement. The impaired children also progress from local to distributed cues. Yet, in contrast to the control group, they do not acknowledge the nominative in coalition with the initial NP in the first experiment but only in support of agreement. However, although they do not seem to appreciate distinct case markers to any large extent in the first experiment, they are irritated if such distinctions are lacking: in experiment II all impaired children turn to. animacy (some in coalition with the initial NP and/or particular word orders). In the discussion, the relationship between short-term memory and processing as well as the relationship between production and comprehension of case markers and agreement are addressed. Further research is needed to explore in more detail "cue costs" in sentence comprehension

The Role of Salience in Second Language Acquisition

Abstract Cues to the actor role such as word order, noun animacy, case inflection and verb agreement vary in strength across languages. The competition model (CM; MacWhinney, 2005) suggests that adult L2 acquisition is difficult due to differences in cue strength between the native and target languages. Using a paradigm inspired by the CM, the present study examines whether salience plays a role in facilitating adjustments of cue strength during L2 learning. Native English speakers were exposed to an artificial language (via an actor-assignment task) which utilized four different cues: verb agreement, case marking, animacy, and word order. Word order, the strongest English cue, was the weakest relative to the other cues, requiring a shift in cue interpretation strategies. Salience was manipulated through the use of visual input enhancement (VIE). The two available morphological cues were presented with 1) no color contrast, 2) both marked with the same color contrast, or 3) each marked with a different color contrast. In Experiment 1, the cue hierarchy was dominated by the morphological cues (verb agreement \u3e case marking \u3e animacy \u3e word order). It was found that VIE was effective in facilitating participant reliance upon the relevant cues, particularly so for the case marking cue. However, in Experiment 2, the cue hierarchy was rearranged so that a semantic cue was most the dominant (animacy \u3e verb agreement \u3e case marking \u3e word order). With this hierarchy rearrangement, we failed to observe any benefit of VIE; participants continuously relied up the animacy cue. We conclude that VIE is a potentially effective tool for helping language learners adapt to the strength of cues in their target language. However, the efficacy of VIE seems limited 1) situations where it marks cues that are very high in the dominance hierarchy, and 2) to cues with low cognitive cost

Animacy, frequency and working memory effects in the acquisition of a noun-adjective agreement pattern in L2 under incidental learning conditions

Animacy is recognized as an important feature in cognition and language processing. The present paper reports the results of an experiment that investigated the effects of animacy of the head noun (animate, denoting animals-epicenes, and inanimate, denoting non-living objects) and working memory on the learning of a noun-adjective agreement pattern in Russian. Participants were 60 novice learners whose L1 did not mark grammatical gender. The between-subjects design manipulated token frequency (high vs. low) under incidental learning conditions. No animacy effect was found in either learning condition. Working memory was a significant factor in both incidental learning conditions, and it explained a greater amount of variance in the high token frequency condition where accuracy was also significantly higher than in the low token condition. The results have implications for incidental learning research and language learning practices, specifically how different factors contribute to the acquisition of L2 grammatical knowledge

The acquisition of the English dative alternation by Russian foreign language learners

Ditransitive verbs include a “recipient” and a “theme” argument (in addition to the subject). The choice of putting one argument before the other (i.e., either recipient-theme, or theme-recipient) is associated with multiple discourse-pragmatic factors. Language have different options to code the ditransitive construction. In English, a ditransitive verb can take two alternating patterns (“the dative alternation”): the Double Object Construction (DOC) (John gives Mary a book) and the to-dative construction (to-dative) (John gives a book to Mary). In Russian, theme and recipient are marked by accusative and dative, respectively. In addition, word order is flexible and either the accusative-marked theme (Pjotr dal knigu Marii), or the dative-marked recipient (Pjotr dal Marii knigu) can come first. This article reports on two sentence rating experiments (acceptability judgments) to test whether Russian learners of English transfer their preferences about the theme-recipient order in Russian to the ditransitive construction in English. A total of 284 Russian students were tested. Results for both tests showed a great variability in the ratings. A comparison of the ratings seems to suggest a small positive correlation, but no statistically significant relation was found between the order preferences in both languages. However, we found a small preference for the use of the to-dative, which we relate to the language acquisition process as proposed by Processability Theory

The acquisition of gender agreement in L3 English by Basque/Spanish bilinguals

211 p.Esta tesis investiga la adquisición de la concordancia de género en los posesivos de tercera persona singular (his/her) en inglés como tercera lengua (L3) por parte de bilingües euskera /castellano. El objetivo principal es analizar el efecto del rasgo animado y los de atracción de género, el nivel de conocimiento de inglés así como la posible transferencia del euskera y castellano al inglés. Un total de 211 participantes divididos en tres grupos de distinto perfil lingüístico (hablantes nativos de inglés, bilingües euskera/castellano, y bilingües castellano-inglés, clasificados estos últimos en tres niveles de conocimiento -principiante, intermedio y avanzado-) completaron siete tareas (tres de comprensión, dos de producción escrita y dos de producción oral) diseñadas para obtener evidencia empírica de cómo establecían la concordancia los participantes no-nativos. Los resultados demostraron que los hablantes bilingües euskera/castellano cometieron más errores de concordancia de género en comparación con los hablantes nativos de castellano. En ambos grupos la tipología de errores fue de características similares. En los contextos donde el sustantivo poseído era animado y difería en género del poseedor, el número de errores era mayor. Los participantes en el grupo de bilingües euskera/castellano y hablantes nativos de castellano mostraron porcentajes de error mayores en las tareas de producción oral que en producción escrita y comprensión. Asimismo, aquellos hablantes con un nivel de inglés más elemental utilizaban más formas de concordancia de género erróneas. La tesis también proporciona datos empíricos que demuestran que los hablantes bilingües transfieren tanto del euskera como del castellano para establecer la concordancia de género en inglés

Word order preferences of Tagalog-speaking adults and children

This article investigates the word order preferences of Tagalog-speaking adults and five- and seven-year-old children. The participants were asked to complete sentences to describe pictures depicting actions between two animate entities. Adults preferred agent-initial constructions in the patient voice but not in the agent voice, while the children produced mainly agent-initial constructions regardless of voice. This agent-initial preference, despite the lack of a close link between the agent and the subject in Tagalog, shows that this word order preference is not merely syntactically-driven (subject-initial preference). Additionally, the children’s agent-initial preference in the agent voice, contrary to the adults’ lack of preference, shows that children do not respect the subject-last principle of ordering Tagalog full noun phrases. These results suggest that language-specific optional features like a subject-last principle take longer to be acquired

The Acquisition of Case in Spanish Pronominal Object Clitics in English-Speaking College-Level L2 Learners

The Second language acquisition (SLA) of Spanish pronominal object clitics (POCs) has been a topic of research with regards to clitic placement (Houston, 1997; Lee, 1987; LoCoco, 1987; VanPatten, 1984; and VanPatten & Houston 1998), acquiring specific dialectal norms (Geeslin, García-Amaya, Hasler-Barker, Henriksen, & Killam, 2010), and functional usage with datives (Zyzik, 2006). A thorough investigation of how second language (L2) learners acquire Spanish POCs in university-level Spanish classes in the United States including accusative POCs has not yet been carried out. This dissertation extends our knowledge of how these learners acquire Spanish POCs and how instruction impacts the acquisition process. Zyzik (2006) suggested that L2 learners create a dative POC prototype based on Animacy instead of Case as native speakers do. The first study of this dissertation extends Zyzik’s work by investigating L2 learners’ processing and use of Spanish pronominal object clitics, including the accusative POCs. A total of 121 L2 learners completed sentence-completion and cloze tasks to investigate how Animacy and Case influenced the way they distinguished Spanish POCs. Results from mixed ANOVAs show that lower proficiency L2 learners base POC distinctions on Animacy. However, more advanced learners show indications of shifting toward a Case-based system. A second study was conducted in order to test whether instruction was effective in preempting (Rutherford, 1989) an Animacy-based system. A second group of 115 L2 learners from different proficiency levels were divided into two groups (instructed and control). These participants completed similar tasks to the first study at three different times (pre-test, post-test, delayed post-test). Between the pre-test and post-test, learners in the instructed group received instruction on Spanish POCs. Results from mixed ANOVAs indicate that instruction was not more effective than exposure to Spanish POCs through the tasks performed. The finding that both participant groups showed evidence of the preemption of an Animacy-based system is taken as evidence that the tasks themselves effectively led learners to change their POC systems. An explanation of this phenomenon is that the tasks provided a type of computer-mediated processing instruction, forcing learners to process the POCs and notice additional possible contexts, effectuating the change

Multilingual Animacy Classification by Sparse Logistic Regression

This paper presents results from three experiments on automatic animacy classification in Japanese and English. We present experiments that focus on solutions to the problem of reliably classifying a large set of infrequent items using a small number of automatically extracted features. We labeled a set of Japanese nouns as ±animate on the basis of reliable, surface-obvious morphological features, producing an accurately but sparsely labeled data set. To classify these nouns, and to achieve good generalization to other nouns for which we do not have labels, we used feature vectors based on frequency counts of verbargument relations that abstract away from item identity and into class-wide distributional tendencies of the feature set. Grouping items into suffix-based equivalence classes prior to classification increased data coverage and improved classification accuracy. For the items that occur at least once with our feature set, we obtained 95% classification accuracy. We used loanwords to transfer automatically acquired labels from English to classify items that are zerofrequency in the Japanese data set, giving increased precision on inanimate items and increased recall on animate items

Character introductions in oral narratives of Swedish-German bilingual preschoolers

Closely related Swedish and German both mark information status of referents morphologically, though little is known about its acquisition. This study investigates character introductions in the narratives of 4- and 6-year-old Swedish–German bilinguals (N = 40) in both languages, elicited with MAIN Cat/Dog. We analyse effects of age group, language and animacy (human vs nonhuman characters) on the type of referring expression (indefinite NP and pronoun), as well as effects of language proficiency and exposure on the use of indefinite NPs for each language. We also explore which syntactic constructions indefinite NPs occur in. A significant difference was found between the two age groups, but not between languages. No effect was found of language skills or exposure. Four-year-olds used more pronouns and a lower proportion of indefinite NPs than 6-year-olds. Pronouns were more frequent for the human character than for nonhuman animate characters. Whilst animacy (humanness) promoted the use of pronouns, it did not affect the choice of morphological form for lexical NPs (indefinite/definite). The age groups differed in how indefinite NPs were used. Four-year-olds produced fewer narrative presentations (where a character is introduced as part of a typical story opening, e.g. Once upon a time there was a cat) than 6-year-olds, and more labellings (with only an NP, or a clausal predicative, e.g. That’s a cat). Qualitative analyses suggest that the children’s indefinite NPs in labelling constructions can be both referential (when setting the narrative scene), and type-denoting (when naming referents in individual pictures). Whilst the children’s abilities to introduce story characters develop measurably from 4 to 6 years in Swedish and German, appropriateness of character introductions not only depends on whether an indefinite NP is chosen, but also on the syntactic construction this indefinite NP is used in.Peer Reviewe