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

The role of statistical learning in the acquisition of motion event construal in a second language

Learning to talk about motion in a second language is very difficult because it involves restructuring deeply entrenched patterns from the first language (Slobin 1996). In this paper we argue that statistical learning (Saffran et al. 1997) can explain why L2 learners are only partially successful in restructuring their second language grammars. We explore to what extent L2 learners make use of two mechanisms of statistical learning, entrenchment and pre-emption (Boyd and Goldberg 2011) to acquire target-like expressions of motion and retreat from overgeneralisation in this domain. Paying attention to the frequency of existing patterns in the input can help learners to adjust the frequency with which they use path and manner verbs in French but is insufficient to acquire the boundary crossing constraint (Slobin and Hoiting 1994) and learn what not to say. We also look at the role of language proficiency and exposure to French in explaining the findings

(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 non‐brain‐damaged 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 non‐brain‐damaged 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 picture‐sequence narratives. The changes with age were limited to two aspects of cohesion and not linear across age groups. The participants’ cognitive skills declined with age. Correlations between some cognitive tests and certain cohesive changes suggest co‐occurring deficits rather than a causal explanation of cohesive decline with age. Conclusions & Implications With ageing there are increased cohesive errors and decreased referential ties, co‐occurring with declining cognitive skills. This study yields important guidance for future research, suggesting that picture‐sequence narrative is the most effective tool for clinical evaluation of discourse, but also that findings from one discourse sample may be misleading