Crossing Disciplinary Boundaries to Improve the Analysis of Second Language Data

A Study of Copula Choice with Adjectives in Spanish

Kimberly L. Geeslin
Indiana University

This volume focuses on the acquisition of the two Spanish copular verbs, ser 'to be' and estar 'to be', by English-speaking adult learners. It outlines a cross-disciplinary approach in which syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features are assessed as predictors of copula choice. This new model of analysis, which uses several variables that are simultaneously present in the discourse context, provides a description of learner language while focusing on language use. This research has implications for theoretical and sociolinguistic approaches to copula choice, and is generalizable to other areas of interest within the field of second language acquisition.

The first section of this book critically examines studies in theoretical and sociolinguistics. The second section includes an in-depth review of previous research on the second language acquisition of copula choice, followed by the presentation and application of a new model of analysis to data from novice, intermediate and advanced learners, and native Spanish speakers. The final section addresses pedagogical and theoretical implications, and outlines future research goals.

Kimberly L. Geeslin is an Assistant Professor of Hispanic Linguistics at Indiana University. Her work on the second language acquisition of Spanish has appeared in Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Linguistics, Language Learning and Hispania.

ISBN 9783895863738. LINCOM Studies in Language Acquisitions 15. 181 pp. 2005.

The Acquisition of the Chinese ba-construction

Hang Du
Middlebury College

The ba-construction is probably the best-known syntactic construction in Modern Standard Chinese, but little has been done on the acquisition of it by second language learners. This study fills this gap. The theoretical framework is Liu’s (1997) aspectual analysis of ba. The study is experimental. The constraint on the ba-NP and the constraint on the ba-VP were investigated. The subjects were 65 students learning Chinese in the intensive Chinese program at the Defense Language Institute (DLI) in Monterey, California. They were in three proficiency groups. A group of 20 native speakers of Chinese also participated as a control group. The study involved two experiments based on video clips: production and grammaticality judgments. The subjects were asked to indicate their confidence in their judgments. Results were that even though the learners generally produced fewer ba-constructions than the native speakers, their judgments of most of the sentences were as good as those of native speakers, indicating that they had some good knowledge of the construction. Moreover, learners with similar production patterns showed different patterns in their grammaticality judgments, suggesting that the two kinds of data complement each other in our understanding of language acquisition.

Results also show that the confidence dimension captured subtle differences that would not have been captured by the judgments of grammaticality alone. Production patterns used by learners to substitute for the ba-construction and error patterns have also been identified. Finally, the variation among native speakers in their judgments of the ba-construction calls for a more systematic study of exactly how native speakers of Standard Chinese use the ba-construction, especially those who have been exposed to other Chinese dialects.

ISBN 9783895864780. LINCOM Studies in Language Acquisition 16. 193pp. 2006.

The acquisition of determiners in bilingual German-Italian and German-French children

Tanja Kupisch
University of Hamburg

This study is concerned with the acquisition of determiners in bilingual children acquiring German simultaneously with a Romance language (French/Italian). It has two major concerns: (i) to shed more light on the interplay between language influence and language dominance and (ii) to examine the relation between forms and functions. Bilingual data is especially suited for this purpose, as bilingual children have been argued to dispose of two grammatical systems, while having only one cognitive system. Thus, we may expect similarities in the acquisition of functions but the acquisition of forms should mirror language specific patterns. The analysis, which is based on a large sample of bilingual data, indicates that things are far more complex. The grammars of a bilingual child are in contact and influence each other.

Contrary to general belief, such influence may be of a positive nature, anticipating syntactic acquisition in one language. It is further argued that language dominance is not the only factor that determines language influence. The book adopts the perspective of Chomskyan Universal grammar, but it contains an empirical study of the acquisition of article functions, discussing whether formal and functional acquisition interact or represent two completely independent processes. The book provides a comprehensive overview of relevant theoretical and empirical work and contains numerous illustrative examples of small children’s linguistic capacities.

ISBN 9783895869969. LINCOM Studies in Language Acquisition 17. 246pp. 2006.

The Second Language Acquisition of Spanish Gender Agreement

The Effects of Linguistic Variables on Accuracy

Irma V. Alarcón
Wake Forest University

This study examines gender agreement between a complex sentential subject (containing two nouns) and a predicate adjective in second language Spanish. The data were collected using a computerized sentence completion task that measured gender agreement accuracy (correct or incorrect). Seven binary linguistic variables were analyzed: noun class of the head and attractor nouns (semantic or non-semantic), head noun morphology (overt or non-overt), gender of the head and attractor nouns (feminine or masculine), and noun class and gender congruencies (matched or mismatched). All possible combinations of the variables were considered.

To date, no study has examined all of these variables in a single experimental design assessing the second language acquisition of Spanish gender agreement. Participants were learners at three different levels of proficiency, and Spanish native speakers. Grammar and vocabulary knowledge were also examined as independent variables. Findings reveal that noun class does not affect accuracy of gender agreement. In contrast, both learners and native speakers are sensitive to the gender and morphology of the head noun, and gender congruency: participants were more accurate when the head noun was masculine and overtly marked for gender, and when the two subject nouns were of the same gender.

Irma V. Alarcón received a Ph.D. in Hispanic Linguistics from Indiana University (2005). She is currently Assistant Professor of Romance Languages at Wake Forest University.

ISBN 9783895863509. LINCOM Studies in Second Language Acquisition 18. 140pp. 2006.

The Acquisition of Malay Wh-Questions

Norhaida Aman
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

The purpose of this study is to provide an account of children's acquisition of wh-questions in the variety of Malay spoken in Singapore. The work examines how children acquire colloquial Malay, the language to which they are exposed at home and in the speech community before they are taught the standard, formal language in school. It is intended to be a contribution to the study of how children acquire typologically distinct language. In addition, it is a contribution to the examination of the grammar of colloquial Malay, a topic which has not been given much attention in studies of the Malay language. The following issues are examined: children's knowledge of the different options for asking simple questions (wh-in situ, questions employing wh-movement and focus questions), their knowledge of these question types in long-distance questions, and the role of island constraints in the syntax of these question types in the Malay of young children. The study uses two experimental methodologies; a comprehension task (the picture-story method) and a production task (elicited imitation). It is also based on a longitudinal spontaneous production study of two Malay-speaking children.

In addition to its descriptive value, the thesis is of theoretical interest. According to the innateness hypothesis, children have a biologically determined knowledge of Universal Grammar, and universals like the island constraints on movement are respected by all languages. Contrary to these expectations, the empirical evidence discussed in this thesis shows that Malay-speaking children, ages 4;5-6;5, appear not to respect island constraints on wh-movement. A careful analysis of the results, however, shows that this seeming challenge to Universal Grammar is more apparent than real, and that the island violations are the result of a processing effect in which in situ wh-questions, which are not subject to islands, prime the responses for the fully moved questions.

ISBN 9783895863806. LINCOM Studies in Language Acquisition 19. 350pp. 2006.

The Acquisition of Vowels in Spanish and English as Second Language

Mariche García Bayonas
University of North Carolina at Greensboro

This study investigates the perception of Spanish vowels: /a e i o u/ and English vowels: / i ɪ ɛ eɪ æ u ʊ oʊ ɑ ʌ/ by native-speakers (NS) of English learning Spanish and NS of Spanish learning English. It analyzes and compares the perception of NS and non-native speakers (NNS) cross-linguistically.

The perception of English vowels has been investigated in depth (Bohn & Flege, 1990; Fox, Flege & Munro, 1995; Mitleb, 1984; Munro, 1993), and it has been cross-linguistically analyzed with French and German among other languages primarily with discrimination and identification tasks. Johnson, Flemming and Wright (1993) analyzed the perception of English vowels by NS using a method of adjustment (MOA) task. No previous study, however, has focused on the investigation of Spanish and English vowels using both natural and synthesized data, and NS and NNS in identification and MOA tasks.

English NS learning Spanish (n= 54) and Spanish NS learning English (n= 17) completed four tasks in Spanish and four in English whereby they were exposed to both natural and synthesized data (330 synthesized vowels, as in Johnson et al. 1993) in order to analyze spectral differences in the perception of both sound systems, and how the learners’ system may vary from that of the NS. In the natural speech tasks they had to identify the vowels with which they were provided from list of written words, one of which contained the target vowel. In addition, they were asked to select which synthesized vowel sounds resembled the most the ones whose spelling was presented to them in the MOA task similar to the one developed by Johnson et al. (1993).

The results obtained indicate that Spanish NS identify English vowels in a less native-like manner than English NS identify Spanish vowels. The method of adjustment tasks with synthesized data yielded average results which indicate that Spanish NS perceive most English vowels with formant values which are different from the ones selected by NS of English. However, English NS perceive Spanish vowels which more closely resemble the ones selected by NS of Spanish.

ISBN 9783895864988. LINCOM Studies in Language Acquisition 20. 162pp. 2006.

Learning to give and respond to peer-feedback in the L2

the case of EFL criticisms and responses to criticism

Nguyen Thi Thuy Minh
Vietnam National University

Interlanguage pragmatics research has contributed a great deal to our understanding of L2 pragmatic use but less to our understanding of L2 pragmatic development, although developmental issues are also its primary research goal. Additionally, previous studies have been confined to a rather small set of speech acts, under-researching such face-damaging acts as criticizing and responding to criticism even though these may be more challenging for L2 learners.

The study reported in this book examines pragmatic development in the use of criticizing and responding to criticism by a group of Vietnamese EFL learners with a view to shedding light on the pragmatic properties of these speech acts. IL data were collected from 12 high beginners, 12 intermediate learners, and 12 advanced learners, via a written questionnaire and a conversation elicitation task, and analyzed with reference to L1 and L2 baseline data collected from 12 Vietnamese and 12 Australian NSs via the same methods. Metapragmatic data were collected via retrospective interview.

The following findings have been discussed in the book:

1. Criticizing and responding to criticism are complex speech acts, which should be described as speech act sets rather than single speech acts and which need to be frequently mitigated in order to maintain harmony between interlocutors. The complexity of these speech acts poses a lot of difficulty to learners, including those with a high level of grammatical competence.

2. While adult learners enjoy a fair amount of universal pragmatic knowledge for free (Kasper, 1992), learning new pragmatic knowledge is still a major task for them when acquiring L2 pragmatics. So is the task of developing a control over attention to this knowledge.

3. Learning environments may play a more important role than we would have expected. EFL learning environments do not seem to facilitate L2 pragmatic development, especially in the case of challenging tasks such as criticizing and responding to criticism, given the learners’ little exposure to the target norms. Classroom discourse, which is biased towards unequal social role relationships (Ellis, 1992; Kasper, 1997), tends to contribute to making the task of learning L2 pragmatics almost impossible in the EFL context.

4. The acquisitional order of modifiers seems to depend on their structural complexity and the degree of cognitive demand involved in producing them as claimed by Meisel et al (1981). Learners seem to attend to external modifiers more than to internal modifiers as the latter contribute only minimal propositional meaning to the speech acts. They also seem to have less difficulty with external modifiers as these are often realized in separate constituents, not as an integral part of the speech acts, and thus do not increase the structural complexity of the speech acts (Hassal, 2001).

5. The relationship between proficiency and transfer may not be a linear one. Also, as hypothesized by Kellerman (1983), learners play an active role in transferring: they do have their own perceptions of what is transferable and what is non-transferable and act accordingly.

Nguyen Thi Thuy Minh has a B.A from Vietnam National University, Hanoi, M.Ed (TESOL) from Queensland University of Technology, Australia, and Ph.D in Language Learning and Teaching from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She is currently lecturing in Applied Linguistics courses at Vietnam National University, Hanoi.

ISBN 9783895863943. LINCOM Studies in Language Acquisition 21. 363pp. 2007. 2nd edition.

Linguistic Competence across Learner Varieties of Spanish

Arnulfo G. Ramírez
Louisiana State University

Linguistic Competence across Learner Varieties of Spanish presents a detailed examination of how five groups of learners/users of Spanish (N=25, 5 at each level) organize and use different aspects of their linguistic competence. The five groups (Basic, Intermediate, Advanced, Superior and Native Speakers) perform language tasks involving three dimensions of language knowledge (verb lexis, sentence production, and metalinguistic judgments of grammaticality) and three aspects of language use (conversa- tional, descriptive, and narrative discourse). The book consists of eight chapters:

Chapter 1 (Introduction), Chapter 2 (Verb Lexis), Chapter 3 (Sentence Formation), Chapter 4 (Metalinguistic Judgments of Grammati- cality), Chapter 5 (Conversational Discourse), Chapter 6 (Descriptive Discourse), Chapter 7 (Narrative Discourse), and Chapter 8 (Linguistic Competence across Language Measures).

Chapters 2 to 7 follow a similar pattern, beginning with a (1) review of major theoretical concerns, (2)methods/procedures for studying the particular aspects of linguistic competence addressed in the chapter, (3) categories for analyzing the linguistic data, (4) quantitative/qualitative description of the performance of each lan- guage group, and (5) Summary and Conclusion. Chapter 8 establishes linguistic profiles for each language group and selected individuals by contrasting the variable performance across the six dimensions of linguistic competence.

ISBN 9783895867903. LINCOM Studies in Language Acquisition 22. 195pp. 2008.

The development of Italian accusative and dative clitics in interlanguage grammars

Maurizio Santoro
City University of New York

The research reported in this monograph portrays quite an interesting acquisition process with regard to the development of Italian clitics in L2 grammars, and, as such, shed some clearer light on several issues that are still unaccounted for. For instance, although there is a general consensus on their slow development, L2 acquisitionists do not seem to agree on what may cause such a delay and what their initial acquisition stage might be. Are clitic properties entirely (Full Transfer/Full Access Hypothesis: Schwartz and Sprouse 1996), or partially accessed through L1 categories (Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis: Lardière 1998b), or derived directly from learners’ universal knowledge (Full Access Hypothesis, Epstein et al. 1996)?

Results show that these properties are not totally attained through L1 categories. Learners’ native language grammar does influence the acquisition of these pronouns, but it does not entirely constitute their initial stage. Their acquisition delay may be attributed to several factors, namely (i) a general difficulty to ‘convert’ the syntactic information into appropriate morphological forms, and (ii) the intrinsic complexity of the cliticization process. Furthermore, regarding the issue of accessibility to Universal Grammar in adult age, data seem to justify some form of continuity since clitics, although absent in L1, are fully acquired.

ISBN 9783895865688. LINCOM Studies in Language Acquisition 23. 136pp. 2008.

The L1 in L2 learning – Teachers’ beliefs and practices

Yanan Song & Stephen Andrews
Shanghai International Studies University; The University of Hong Kong

Opinions concerning the use of the L1 in L2 learning and teaching have differed markedly over the years. For much of the past century, it has generally been asserted by theorists and methodologists that the L1 has a largely negative influence on L2 learning and that its use should therefore be kept to an absolute minimum in L2 teaching. However, in recent years this position has been called into question, leading to the beginnings of a reassessment of previous orthodoxies.

This book sets out to examine this controversial issue of the L1 in L2 teaching and learning from the perspective of the practitioner rather than the theorist. Focusing on the cases of four L2 teachers, all of whom share the same L1 as their students, this book investigates in depth the attitudes these four teachers hold towards the L1 in their L2 teaching, the extent to which their attitudes are reflected in their L1-related behaviours in class, and the factors they perceive as influences on their beliefs and behaviours. The book contributes to our understanding of teachers’ perceptions of the L1 as a medium of instruction in L2 teaching and of their L1-related practices when faced with day-to-day classroom realities. It examines the potential implications of these enhanced understandings for teacher education.

ISBN 9783895865787. LINCOM Studies in Language Acquisition 24. 237pp. 2008.