Looking for Roots in the Substrate: The Cases of Ebonics and Anglo-Irish

Despite many differences in the sociolinguistic setting of Hiberno- English in Ireland and African-American Vernacular English in the USA, arguments about substrate influence have been invoked in both cases to promote the notion of separate linguistic identities. In the case of Ireland, Henry (1958, 1977) has insisted that the proper term to describe the vernacular now used by many in rural Ireland is “Anglo-Irish”, as opposed to “Hiberno-English” or “Irish English”, and he argues that “a new language” was created as a result of the substrate influence that became especially prominent in the nineteenth century. There have likewise been strong claims about the significance of substrate influence in African American Vernacular English, or to use the term advocated by the Oakland School Board, “Ebonics”. In 1996 the Board declared this variety to be “not a dialect of English” but instead an instance of “African Language Systems”. The arguments of Henry and of the Oakland School Board may not convince linguists that Anglo-Irish and Ebonics are indeed distinct languages, but these claims do warrant reconsidering the question of where English begins and ends

EFFECTS OF CROSS-LINGUISTIC INFLUENCES ON SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF SEMANTIC TRANSFER IN WRITTEN PRODUCTION

[EN] This article concentrates on the impact that cross-linguistic influences have on second language acquisition. It investigates the importance of the learner's native language (L1) in written production of a second language (L2), particularly the use of L1 linguistic rules by Spanish speakers when they are writing in the target language (L2). This exploratory research focuses on the production errors made by students relative to specific subsystems such as semantic and syntactic areas. Errors are studied with respect to the differences between Spanish and English through a contrastive analysis between both languages in problematic linguistic areas. In this article only semantic errors will be considered as a first approximation to the study of transfer in written production. The results indicate that transfer is a reality and an important determinant in the process of second language acquisition. Teachers in an EFL context should be able to identify this phenomenon in order to prevent the errors which may arise from it.Ramón Torrijos, MDM. (2009). EFFECTS OF CROSS-LINGUISTIC INFLUENCES ON SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF SEMANTIC TRANSFER IN WRITTEN PRODUCTION. Revista de Lingüística y Lenguas Aplicadas. 4:147-159. doi:10.4995/rlyla.2009.741SWORD147159

HEIRLOOM

‘Heirloom’ captured nostalgic personal histories that are fast disappearing from our textile landscape. Designers and historians engaged with an intergenerational, diverse group of men over several weeks at Queen Street Mill (QSM) Burnley. Our aim was to reach out to men who were part of the thriving regional textile industry, from communities that were dispersed after the mass closure of mills in the 1980’s. Many of these men have since had minimal connection to textiles and little chance to share memories or tell their stories. Textile work is so often linked to women, when in fact, through our Research we found that certainly within South Asian cultures it was, and still is an industry dominated by men. Through our Research process we explored family histories, links to textile artefacts and heritage of Lancashire and captured incredibly moving stories, full of passion and emotions, including stories of migration that brought workers to northern textile mills in the 60’s. We drew inspiration from these personal narratives, interpreting each story into a hand-crafted bespoke ‘heirloom’ shirt, made even more poignant by using authentic mule spun cloth woven at QSM, using the last steam powered looms in the world. Heirloom explores links between masculinity, clothing, identity and work. The vehicle became the ubiquitous male garment – the shirt. We undertook an extensive study of the historical shirts and artefacts held within the Gawthorpe Textile Collection (GTC), embedding this research into detail and silhouettes, including a hand-stitched numbering system. Portraits were taken of the men wearing their shirts in QSM and were displayed alongside the shirts, stories and historical inspiration from GTC as part of the British Textile Biennial in October 2019. We produced a highly illustrated Heirloom catalogue to accompany the exhibition which included the background research, portraits and stories

In ‘other’ words: Some thoughts on the transferability of collocations

<p>In discussions of cross-linguistic influence (also known as language transfer), the focus is usually on the influence of a particular structure in a particular instance of language contact, for instance, the negative transfer of serial verbs by Vietnamese learners of English: <em>She has managed to rise the kite fly over the tallest building</em> (Helms-Park, 2003). Even so, as Helms-Park acknowledges, serial verb constructions can and do surface in contact situations besides the one she studied in Canada, and they can involve speakers of different languages. While serial verb constructions have unique syntactic traits, the same point about the transferability of multiword constructions in different contact settings is applicable in other instances and with collocations that can be viewed as unique in their lexical as well as syntactic characteristics. The following article considers such a case, based in part on my own teaching experience but also on transfer research from other settings as well. After a discussion of a collocation that I call the repeated <em>other</em> pattern found in different settings, I briefly consider other cases of transfer having lexical and syntactic peculiarities and appearing in more than one contact situation. There will also be some discussion of factors that transfer researchers and language teachers would do well to consider.</p

Production of L3 Vowels: Is it Possible to Separate them from L1 and L2 Sounds?

It is incontrovertible that acquisition of a sound system of a second language is always a complex phenomenon and presents a great challenge for L2 learners (e.g. Rojczyk, 2010a). There are numerous studies (e.g. Nowacka, 2010; Flege, 1991) which show that L2 learners whose first language has a scarce number of sounds, have problems to distinguish L2 sound categories and tend to apply their L1 segments to new contexts. It may be easily detectable in the case of vowels. There is abundance of studies examining L2 learners’ successes and failures in production of L1 and L2 vowels (e.g. Flege, 1992; Nowacka, 2010; Rojczyk, 2010a). Usually such projects show how difficult it is for L2 learners to separate “old” and “new” vowel categories. However, the situation becomes much more complicated when we think of third language (L3) production. While in the case of L2 segmental production the number of factors affecting L2 sounds is rather limited (either interference from learners’ L1 or some kind of L2 intralingual influence), in the case of L3 segmental production we may encounter L1→L3, L2→L3 or L3 intralingual interference. This makes separation of L3 sounds a much more complex process. The aim of this study is to examine whether speakers of L1 Polish, L2 English and L3 German are able to separate new, L3 vowel categories from their native and L2 categories. Being a part of a larger project, this time the focus is on German /œ/. This vowel was chosen since it is regarded as especially difficult for Polish learners of German and it is frequently substituted with some other sounds. A group of English philology (Polish-English-German translation and interpretation programme) students was chosen to participate in this project. They were advanced speakers of English who did not encounter any difficulties in communication with native speakers of this language and upper-intermediate users of German. They had been taught both English and German pronunciation/practical phonetics during their studies at the University of Silesia. The subjects were asked to produce words containing analysed vowels, namely: P /u/, P /ɔ/, P /ɛ/, E /u/, E /ɔ / and G /œ/. All examined vowels were embedded in a /bVt/ context. The target /bVt/ words were then embedded in carrier sentences I said /bVt/ this time in English, Ich sag’ /bVt/ diesmal in German and Mówię /bVt/ teraz in Polish, in a non-final position. The sentences were presented to subjects on a computer screen and the produced chunks were stored in a notebook’s memory as .wav files ready for inspection. The Praat 5.3.12 speech-analysis software package (Boersma, 2001) was used to scroll through the audio files in order to locate an onset and offset of target vowels, measure the F1 and F2 frequencies and plot vowels on the plane. All analyses were also performed using Praat. The obtained results shed new light on L3 segmental production and L1 and L2 interference

Native Speaker Perceptions of Accented Speech: The English Pronunciation of Macedonian EFL Learners

The paper reports on the results of a study that aimed to describe the vocalic and consonantal features of the English pronunciation of Macedonian EFL learners as perceived by native speakers of English and to find out whether native speakers who speak different standard variants of English perceive the same segments as non-native. A specially designed computer web application was employed to gather two types of data: a) quantitative (frequency of segment variables and global foreign accent ratings on a 5-point scale), and b) qualitative (open-ended questions). The result analysis points out to three most frequent markers of foreign accent in the English speech of Macedonian EFL learners: final obstruent devoicing, vowel shortening and substitution of English dental fricatives with Macedonian dental plosives. It also reflects additional phonetic aspects poorly explained in the available reference literature such as allophonic distributional differences between the two languages and intonational mismatch

Electrophysiological correlates of error monitoring and feedback processing in second language learning

Humans monitor their behavior to optimize performance, which presumably relies on stable representations of correct responses. During second language (L2) learning, however, stable representations have yet to be formed while knowledge of the first language (L1) can interfere with learning, which in some cases results in persistent errors. In order to examine how correct L2 representations are stabilized, this study examined performance monitoring in the learning process of second language learners for a feature that conflicts with their first language. Using EEG, we investigated if L2 learners in a feedback-guided word gender assignment task showed signs of error detection in the form of an error-related negativity (ERN) before and after receiving feedback, and how feedback is processed. The results indicated that initially, response-locked negativities for correct (CRN) and incorrect (ERN) responses were of similar size, showing a lack of internal error detection when L2 representations are unstable. As behavioral performance improved following feedback, the ERN became larger than the CRN, pointing to the first signs of successful error detection. Additionally, we observed a second negativity following the ERN/CRN components, the amplitude of which followed a similar pattern as the previous negativities. Feedback-locked data indicated robust FRN and P300 effects in response to negative feedback across different rounds, demonstrating that feedback remained important in order to update memory representations during learning. We thus show that initially, L2 representations may often not be stable enough to warrant successful error monitoring, but can be stabilized through repeated feedback, which means that the brain is able to overcome L1 interference, and can learn to detect errors internally after a short training session. The results contribute a different perspective to the discussion on changes in ERN and FRN components in relation to learning, by extending the investigation of these effects to the language learning domain. Furthermore, these findings provide a further characterization of the online learning process of L2 learners

Evidence for language transfer leading to a perceptual advantage for non-native listeners

Phonological transfer from the native language is a common problem for non-native speakers that has repeatedly been shown to result in perceptual deficits vis-a-vis native speakers. It was hypothesized, however, that transfer could help, rather than hurt, if it resulted in a beneficial bias. Due to differences in pronunciation norms between Korean and English, Koreans in the U.S. were predicted to be better than Americans at perceiving unreleased stops--not only in their native language (Korean) but also in their non-native language (English). In three experiments, Koreans were found to be significantly more accurate than Americans at identifying unreleased stops in Korean, at identifying unreleased stops in English, and at discriminating between the presence and absence of an unreleased stop in English. Taken together, these results suggest that cross-linguistic transfer is capable of boosting speech perception by non-natives beyond native levels

Modeling Systematicity and Individuality in Nonlinear Second Language Development: The Case of English Grammatical Morphemes

This article introduces two sophisticated statistical modeling techniques that allow researchers to analyze systematicity, individual variation, and nonlinearity in second language (L2) development. Generalized linear mixed-effects models can be used to quantify individual variation and examine systematic effects simultaneously, and generalized additive mixed models allow for the examination of systematicity, individuality,and nonlinearity within a single model. Based on a longitudinal learner corpus, this article illustrates the usefulness of these models in the context of L2 accuracy development of English grammatical morphemes. I discuss the strengths of each technique and the ways in which these techniques can benefit L2 acquisition research, further highlighting the importance of accounting for individual variation in modeling L2 development.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Wiley via http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/lang.1216