Questions with long-distance dependencies: a usage-based perspective

Attested questions with long-distance dependencies (e.g., What do you think you’re doing?) tend to be quite stereotypical: the matrix clause usually consists of a WH word, the auxiliary do or did, the pronoun you, and the verb think or say, with no other elements; and they virtually never contain more than one subordinate clause. This has lead some researchers in the usage-based framework (Da˛browska 2004; Verhagen 2005) to hypothesise that speakers’ knowledge about such constructions is best explained in terms of relatively specific, low level templates rather than general rules that apply ‘‘across the board’’. The research reported here was designed to test this hypothesis and alternative hypotheses derived from rule-based theories

The later development of an early-emerging system: the curious case of the Polish genitive

Eighty Polish children and adolescents aged from 6 to 18 participated in a nonce word inflection experiment testing their productivity with the two genitive masculine endings, -a and -u, and their sensitivity to the distributional and semantic factors determining the choice of ending. All participants were able to use at least one ending productively, although the youngest children did not do so consistently, confirming earlier research which suggests that children are only partially productive with these inflections. In the youngest group, the choice of ending was not influenced by either semantic or distributional cues. Participants began to show sensitivity to distributional cues from about ten years of age; the strength of this sensitivity continued to increase right up to age 18. However, only a few of the oldest participants were also sensitive to the semantic factors determining the choice of ending. Another unexpected finding was a sharp increase in the number of gender errors around age 14, suggesting that the system might be undergoing a reorganization at this late age. The experiment also revealed considerable individual differences in the rate of development as well as the actual generalizations that learners extract. The results challenge the widely-held view that learners' mental grammars reach a steady state in early or middle childhood, and that speakers of the same dialect acquire the same set of rules

Lexically specific knowledge and individual differences in adult native speakers’ processing of the English passive

This article provides experimental evidence for the role of lexically specific representations in the processing of passive sentences and considerable education-related differences in comprehension of the passive construction. The experiment measured response time and decision accuracy of participants with high and low academic attainment using an online task that compared processing and comprehension of active and passive sentences containing verbs strongly associated with the passive and active constructions, as determined by collostructional analysis. As predicted by usage-based accounts, participants’ performance was influenced by frequency (both groups processed actives faster than passives; the low academic attainment participants also made significantly more errors on passive sentences) and lexical specificity (i.e., processing of passives was slower with verbs strongly associated with the active). Contra to proposals made by Dąbrowska and Street (2006), the results suggest that all participants have verb-specific as well as verb-general representations, but that the latter are not as entrenched in the participants with low academic attainment, resulting in less reliable performance. The results also show no evidence of a speed–accuracy trade-off, making alternative accounts of the results (e.g., those of two-stage processing models, such as Townsend & Bever, 2001) problematic

Polish children's productivity with case marking: the role of regularity, type frequency, and phonological diversity

Polish-speaking children aged from 2;4, to 4;8 and 16 adult controls participated in a nonce-word inflection experiment testing their ability to use the genitive, dative and accusative inflections productively. Results show that this ability develops early: the majority of two-year-olds were already productive with all inflections apart from dative neuter; and the overall performance of the four-year-olds was very similar to that of adults. All age groups were more productive with inflections that apply to large and/or phonologically diverse classes, although class size and token frequency appeared to be more important for younger children (two- and three-year-olds) and phonological diversity for older children and adults. Regularity, on the other hand, was a very poor predictor of productivity. The results support usage-based models of language acquisition and are problematic for the dual mechanism model

Implicit lexical knowledge

There is a broad consensus that native speakers' knowledge of the grammatical system of their language is predominantly implicit, i.e., unconscious and acquired incidentally rather than intentionally. Word meaning, in contrast, is regarded as the paradigm case of explicit, or declarative, knowledge (although some aspects of lexical knowledge, e. g. collocations and grammatical features, may be implicit). This paper presents evidence that knowledge of word meanings can also be implicit. 63 undergraduate students were given a self-evaluation task in which they were asked to assess their own knowledge of low frequency words, followed by a multiple-choice test providing an objective measure of their knowledge of the same words; they were asked to guess if they did not know the meaning of a word. Results indicate that even when participants claimed to be guessing, their performance was significantly above chance, indicating the existence of implicit knowledge by the guessing criterion (Dienes 2008)

Different speakers, different grammars: Individual differences in native language attainment

This article reviews several recent studies suggesting that – contrary to a widespread belief – adult monolingual native speakers of the same language do not share the same mental grammar. The studies examined various aspects of linguistic knowledge, including inflectional morphology, passives, quantifiers, and more complex constructions with subordinate clauses. The findings suggest that in some cases, language learners attend to different cues in the input and end up with different grammars; in others, some speakers extract only fairly specific, ‘local’ generalizations which apply to particular subclasses of items while others acquire more abstract rules which apply ‘across the board’. At least some of these differences are education-related: more educated speakers appear to acquire more general rules, possibly as a result of more varied linguistic experience. These findings have interesting consequences for research on bilingualism, particularly for research on ultimate attainment in second language acquisition, as well as important methodological implications for all language sciences

A Comparison of the Perceptions of Risk and Health Between Old Order Mennonites and Mainstream Society in the Grand River Valley: A Cross-Cultural Analysis

The role of culture in the geography of health and technological hazard perception research is an important and relatively recent avenue of research. This dissertation contributes to this research by exploring cross-cultural differences in health and risk perceptions and by examining the relationship between health and place. It involves an in-depth examination of perceptions and meaning of health, as they exist in the local context. It is the first geographical research conducted with individual members of the Old Order Mennonite community considering perceptions of health, technological hazard and understandings of environmental risk. The studied communities are situated at an agricultural/industrial interface near Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario. For the last twenty years the town of Elmira and its surrounding agricultural lands have been the subject of environmental concerns due to the area’s extended exposure to toxic wastes, produced during the manufacture of rubber, highly toxic herbicides and pesticides. These pose significant health risks to the local populations especially to members of the Old Order Mennonite community whose farms are located along the most contaminated tributary of the Grand River in close proximity to Elmira. In the research, perception of health, risk and environment are examined in 48 in-depth interviews involving the Old Order Mennonites, women frmo the mainstream society living in Elmira, and professional and key health informants. The thesis provides contributions to the research of health geography. Health conceptualizations and health understandings are compared among the groups to reveal culturally-constructed experiences in the local landscapes. Various perceptions of people’s well-being in place are explored by incorporating the religious beliefs and associated cultural practices of Old Order Mennonites. Cultural, ethnic and religious isolation of the Old Order Mennonites and their concerns about maintaining strict traditions have contributed to their unique understandings of health in place. Contrasting understandings of local landscapes are presented, the landscape of mainstream society and the therapeutic landscape of the Old Order Mennonites. In this study, the Old Order Mennonites women are found to be empowered by the religious and cultural differences that sustain their different holistic understandings of their health landscape. The thesis provides contributions to geography of environmental risk research. Drawing on the social amplification of risk framework (SARF) developed by Kasperson, Renn, Slovic, and their colleagues (1992), a study framework is proposed to reveal how cultural beliefs and practices and religious values contextualize responses to technological hazards. Incorporated in the framework are four categories of cultural processes (threats to lives, core values, worldviews and community context) through which the meanings of risk are either amplified or attenuated among the groups. The study proposes a way of unpacking the black box of culture by using a qualitative based explanation of the dimension of culture that influence risk perceptions. In summary, the thesis highlights different perspectives on children’s and women’s health and risk associated with participant ethnicity. From a practical perspective, it informs public health and environmental risk management decision makers of the importance of cultural differences which need to be addressed to reduce inequalities existing in the Elmira area