Genericity in Greek: An Experimental Investigation

In this paper we present results from a context-acceptability judgment task that addressed genericity in Greek following a design used by Ionin et al. (2011). The task investigates two sources of genericity: (a) sentence-level genericity with a non-Well-Defined Kind (e.g., “a green lamp”) and (b) NP-level genericity with a WDK (e.g., “a dodo bird”) followed by a kind predicate (e.g., “be extinct”). Our results largely confirm the predictions and support Dayal’s (2004) theoretical account of genericity: definite singulars were rated higher with NP-level than with sentence-level genericity, definite plurals were rated equally high with both types of genericity, and modified indefinite singulars were rated higher with sentence-level than with NP-level genericity. With respect to the WDK restriction on definite singulars, even though the difference between the two conditions was significant, definite singulars with sentence-level genericity were rated higher than expected. This casts doubts on the universality WDK restriction, which would have to be addressed in future work

Language Attrition and Lived Experiences of Attrition among Greek Speakers in London:Special Issue Investigating Language Contact and New Varieties

The purpose of this study was to investigate attrition effects in a group of L1-Greek–L2-English speakers and to explore their views on attrition and their feelings about their own use of both languages. The first part (n = 32) was a psycholinguistic study measuring semantic and formal verbal fluency which was part of a broader project. The second part (n = 14) was a sociolinguistic study of semi-structured interviews aiming to gain insights into participants’ lived experiences of attrition. In verbal fluency, monolinguals outperformed bilinguals in the number of correct responses in both semantic and formal fluency. The analysis of the interview transcripts suggested that attriters experience attrition negatively, as a loss of a competence they once had, with two types of negative experiences emerging more prominently: (a) the realisation that they have difficulties with lexical retrieval and (b) stigmatising and judgemental comments by (non)-attriters. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, this study on attriters can give us unique insights into their lived experience of attrition

Generalizing About Striking Properties: Do Glippets Love to Play With Fire?

Two experiments investigated whether 4- and 5-year-old children are sensitive to whether the content of a generalization is about a salient or noteworthy property (henceforth "striking") and whether varying the number of exceptions has any effect on children's willingness to extend a property after having heard a generalization. Moreover, they investigated how the content of a generalization interacts with exception tolerance. Adult data were collected for comparison. We used generalizations to describe novel kinds (e.g., "glippets") that had either a neutral (e.g., "play with toys") or a striking property (e.g., "play with fire") and measured how willing participants were to extend the property to a new instance of the novel kind. Experiment 1 demonstrated that both adults and children show sensitivity to strikingness in that striking properties were extended less than neutral ones, although children extended less than adults overall. The responses of both age groups were significantly different from chance. Experiment 2 introduced varying numbers of exceptions to the generalization made (minimal: 1 exception; maximal: 3 exceptions). Both adults and children extended both types of properties even in the face of exceptions, but to a lower degree than in Experiment 1. Striking properties were extended less than neutral ones, as in Experiment 1. We observed that the greater the number of exceptions, the lower the rates of extension we obtained, for both types of properties in adults, but only with striking properties in children. Children seemed to keep track of varying numbers of exceptions for striking properties, but their performance did not differ from chance. The findings underscore that 4- and 5-year-old children are sensitive to strikingness and to exception tolerance for generalizations and are developing toward an adult-like behavior with respect to the interplay between strikingness and exception tolerance when they learn about novel kinds. We discuss the implications of these results with regards to how children make generalizations

Generics as default? Comparing the acquisition of universals and generics in Spanish

This paper reports an experiment that investigates interpretive distinctionsbetween two different expressions of generalization in Spanish. In particular, our aimwas to find out when the distinction between generic statements (GS) such as Tigershave stripes and universal quantified statements (UQS) such as All tigers have stripeswas acquired in Spanish-speaking children of two different age groups (4/5-year-oldsand 8/9-year-olds), and then compare these results with adults. The starting point ofthis research was the semantic distinction between GS and UQS in that the formeradmits exceptions, unlike the latter. On the other hand, cognitive psychologists haveobserved a Generic overgeneralization effect (GOG) consisting in allowing for UQSto be felicitous in the face of exceptions, thus proposing that this “error” stems frompeople misinterpreting UQS as GS and from GS being defaults (simpler, more easilylearned and processed) instead of involving quasi-universal quantification, which wasthe learned view from semantics. In the current paper we aimed to test the “Generics asDefault” (GAD) hypothesis by comparing GS and UQS in three different age ranges.Our data show that, overall, participants accept GS more often than they reject UQS.Moreover, we also confirm a hypothesized interaction between age and NP type (GSvs UQS). Further, we present several data points that are not predicted by the GAD,including an observed decline in the accuracy of GS in the older group of children aswell as in adults with respect to younger children, and that children fail at rejectinggenerics that adults reject

Illusory vowels in Spanish-English sequential bilinguals : Evidence that accurate L2 perception is neither necessary nor sufficient for accurate L2 production

Altres ajuts: British Academy - SG112797Spanish native speakers are known to pronounce onset /sC/ clusters in English with a prothetic vowel, as in esport for sport, due to their native language phonotactic constraints. We assessed whether accurate production of e.g. spi instead of espi, was related to accurate perceptual discrimination of this contrast in L2 speech of Spanish-English sequential bilinguals. A same-different discrimination task in stimulus pairs such as spi-espi assessed speech perception and a phonemic verbal fluency task elicited speech production. Logistic mixed model regressions revealed significant differences in accuracy between the bilinguals and the English monolinguals, although some bilinguals performed within the monolingual range. For the production task, but not for the perception task, bilinguals with more exposure to English and greater grammatical knowledge of English performed significantly more accurately than those with less exposure and lower grammatical knowledge. There was no significant correlation between production accuracy and perception accuracy. Through examining phonotactic constraints, these results expand a growing body of research into single sounds which suggests dissociations between L2 perception and production. In contrast to predictions made by L2 speech models, the findings indicate that accurate L2 perception is neither necessary nor sufficient for accurate L2 production, and instead are interpreted to indicate that the two capacities recruit different executive control mechanisms and are acquired - at least to a certain extent - independently in L2 acquisition

Illusory vowels in Spanish-English sequential bilinguals: Evidence that accurate L2 perception is neither necessary nor sufficient for accurate L2 production

Spanish native speakers are known to pronounce onset /sC/ clusters in English with a prothetic vowel, as in esport for sport, due to their native language phonotactic constraints. We assessed whether accurate production of e.g. spi instead of espi was related to accurate perceptual discrimination of this contrast in second language (L2) speech of Spanish–English sequential bilinguals. A same–different discrimination task in stimulus pairs such as spi–espi assessed speech perception and a phonemic verbal fluency task elicited speech production. Logistic mixed model regressions revealed significant differences in accuracy between the bilinguals and the English monolinguals, although some bilinguals performed within the monolingual range. For the production task, but not for the perception task, bilinguals with more exposure to English and greater grammatical knowledge of English performed significantly more accurately than those with less exposure and lower grammatical knowledge. There was no significant correlation between production accuracy and perception accuracy. Through examining phonotactic constraints, these results expand a growing body of research into single sounds which suggests dissociations between L2 perception and production. In contrast to predictions made by L2 speech models, the findings indicate that accurate L2 perception is neither necessary nor sufficient for accurate L2 production, and instead are interpreted to indicate that the two capacities recruit different executive control mechanisms and are acquired – at least to a certain extent – independently in L2 acquisition.Peer Reviewe

Genericity

‘Birds fly’, ‘The fox is a sly animal’, and ‘A cat lands on its feet’ are all generic generalizations that allow speakers to talk about kinds of entities rather than individuals and to refer to their characteristic or essential properties. Their complex yet fundamental nature has attracted the interest of linguists and philosophers of language since the 1970s while they have also recently become the focus of concentrated interest by cognitive and developmental psychologists. The two main approaches to genericity in two different fields, formal semantics and cognitive psychology, are discussed. The review of the experimental research on the topic reveals that while the experimental study of generics is still in its early stages, interdisciplinary work that integrates the tools and perspectives of both strands of investigation can substantially advance our understanding of the topic