6 research outputs found
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L1 transfer in the acquisition of manner and path in Spanish by native speakers of English
In this article the authors argue that L1 transfer from English is not only important in the early stages of L2 acquisition of Spanish, but remains influential in later stages if there is not enough positive evidence for the learners to progress in their development (Lefebvre, White, & Jourdan, 2006). The findings are based on analyses of path and manner of movement in stories told by British students of Spanish (N = 68) of three different proficiency levels. Verbs that conflate motion and path, on the one hand, are mastered early, possibly because the existence of Latinate path verbs, such as enter and ascend in English, facilitate their early acquisition by British learners of Spanish. Contrary to the findings of Cadierno (2004) and Cadierno and Ruiz (2006), the encoding of manner, in particular in boundary crossing contexts, seems to pose enormous difficulties, even among students who had been abroad on a placement in a Spanish-speaking country prior to the data collection. An analysis of the frequency of manner verbs in Spanish corpora shows that one of the key reasons why students struggle with manner is that manner verbs are so infrequent in Spanish. The authors claim that scarce positive evidence in the language exposed to and little or no negative evidence are responsible for the long-lasting effect of transfer on the expression of manner
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(In)Complete acquisition of Turkish among Turkish German bilinguals in Germany and Turkey: an analysis of complex embeddings in narratives
Although most researchers recognise that the language repertoire of bilinguals can mvary, few studies have tried to address variation in bilingual competence in any
detail. This study aims to take a first step towards further understanding the way in which bilingual competencies can vary at the level of syntax by comparing the use of syntactic embeddings among three different groups of Turkish/German bilinguals.
The approach of the present paper is new in that different groups of bilinguals are compared with each other, and not only with monolingual speakers, as is common in most studies in the field. The analysis focuses on differences in the use of embeddings in Turkish, which are generally considered to be one of the more complex aspects of Turkish grammar. The study shows that young Turkish/German
bilingual adults who were born and raised in Germany use fewer, and less complex embeddings than Turkish/German bilingual returnees who had lived in Turkey for
eight years at the time of recording. The present study provides new insights in the nature of bilingual competence, as well as a new perspective on syntactic change in immigrant Turkish as spoken in Europe
Textual cohesion in oral narrative and procedural discourse: the effects of ageing and cognitive skills
Abstract
Background
Knowledge of the discourse performance of nonâbrainâdamaged individuals is critical not only for its differentiation from disordered expression but also for more accurate models of ageing and communication. The effect of ageing and cognitive skills on the cohesive adequacy of discourse has, until now, presented a confusing and ambiguous picture.
Aims
To examine comprehensively the effects of both age and cognitive skills on the discourse cohesion of 32 nonâbrainâdamaged males divided into four age groups.
Methods & Procedures
A large body of narrative and procedural samples (394 samples) was elicited from the participants. Their cognitive skills were determined using three tests, whilst their discourse cohesion was analyzed and correlated with the cognitive test results.
Outcomes & Results
This extensive investigation of ageing effects on discourse cohesion and their relationship to cognitive behaviour did not provide neat generalizable results. It showed that ageing significantly increases the number of cohesive errors and reduces the quantity of referential ties in pictureâsequence narratives. The changes with age were limited to two aspects of cohesion and not linear across age groups. The participantsâ cognitive skills declined with age. Correlations between some cognitive tests and certain cohesive changes suggest coâoccurring deficits rather than a causal explanation of cohesive decline with age.
Conclusions & Implications
With ageing there are increased cohesive errors and decreased referential ties, coâoccurring with declining cognitive skills. This study yields important guidance for future research, suggesting that pictureâsequence narrative is the most effective tool for clinical evaluation of discourse, but also that findings from one discourse sample may be misleading