An official website of the United States government
Expectation is a powerful mechanism in native-language processing. Less is known about its role in non-native language processing, especially for expectations at the discourse level. This study presents evidence from a story-continuation task, adapted from previous work with native speakers (Rohde et al., 2006), probing next-mention and coherence expectations among Japanese- and Korean-speaking learners of English. As in previous work, verbal aspect (perfective/imperfective) in a context sentence describing a transfer-of-possession event (e.g., Ron gave/was giving a towel to Patrick) modulated participants’ choices of next referents in their continuations. However, this effect was diminished in the non-native compared to the native-speaker group, despite comparable performance on an independent task assessing knowledge of verbal aspect in English, and previous evidence for significant effects of aspect on referential patterns in native Japanese and Korean processing (Ueno & Kehler, 2010; Kim et al., 2013). The two groups of speakers were equally sensitive to a cue that does not require predictive processing – the referential form of the story-continuation prompt – in that both groups were significantly more likely to establish reference to the discourse topic/Source of the transfer event for pronoun-initial continuations than for name-initial ones. Moreover, recency played a stronger role in non-native speakers’ referential choices than in those of native speakers. These results suggest that while native speakers engage in proactive discourse processing, non-native speakers are less able to do so, being sufficiently burdened by reactive processes required for information integration that they have only Reduced Ability to Generate Expectations (RAGE).
more »
« less
Coreference and discourse coherence in L2: The roles of grammatical aspect and referential form
Discourse-level factors, such as event structure and the form of referential expressions, play an important role in native speakers’ referential processing. This paper presents an experiment with Japanese- and Korean-speaking learners of English, investigating the extent to which discourse-level biases that have gradient effects in L1 speakers are also implicated in L2 speakers’ coreference choices. Results from a story continuation task indicate that biases involving referential form were remarkably similar for L1 and L2 speakers. In contrast, event structure, indicated by perfective versus imperfective aspect, had a more limited effect on L2 speakers’ referential choices. The L2 results are discussed in light of existing accounts of L1 reference processing, which assume that referential choices are shaped by speakers’ continually updated expectations about what is likely to be mentioned next, and argued to reflect L2 speakers’ reduced reliance on expectations.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1251450
- PAR ID:
- 10028986
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
- Volume:
- 7
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 1879-9264
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 199 to 229
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Event concepts of common verbs (e.g. eat, sleep) can be broadly shared across languages, but a given language’s rules for subcategorization are largely arbitrary and vary substantially across languages. When subcategorization information does not match between first language (L1) and second language (L2), how does this mismatch impact L2 speakers in real time? We hypothesized that subcategorization knowledge in L1 is particularly difficult for L2 speakers to override online. Event-related potential (ERP) responses were recorded from English sentences that include verbs that were ambitransitive in Mandarin but intransitive in English (* My sister listened the music). While L1 English speakers showed a prominent P600 effect to subcategorization violations, L2 English speakers whose L1 was Mandarin showed some sensitivity in offline responses but not in ERPs. This suggests that computing verb–argument relations, although seemingly one of the basic components of sentence comprehension, in fact requires accessing lexical syntax which may be vulnerable to L1 interference in L2. However, our exploratory analysis showed that more native-like behavioral accuracy was associated with a more native-like P600 effect, suggesting that, with enough experience, L2 speakers can ultimately overcome this interference.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)Behavioral studies on language processing rely on the eye-mind assumption, which states that the time spent looking at text is an index of the time spent processing it. In most cases, relatively shorter reading times are interpreted as evidence of greater processing efficiency. However, previous evidence from L2 research indicates that non-native participants who present fast reading times are not always more efficient readers, but rather shallow parsers. Because earlier studies did not identify a reliable predictor of variability in L2 processing, such uncertainty around the interpretation of reading times introduces a potential confound that undermines the credibility and the conclusions of online measures of processing. The present study proposes that a recently developed modulator of online processing efficiency, namely, chunking ability, may account for the observed variability in L2 online reading performance. L1 English – L2 Spanish learners’ eye movements were analyzed during natural reading. Chunking ability was predictive of overall reading speed. Target relative clauses contained L2 Verb-Noun multiword units, which were manipulated with regards to their L1-L2 congruency. The results indicated that processing of the L1-L2 incongruent units was modulated by an interaction of L2 chunking ability and level of knowledge of multiword units. Critically, the data revealed an inverse U-shaped pattern, with faster reading times in both learners with the highest and the lowest chunking ability scores, suggesting fast integration in the former, and lack of integration in the latter. Additionally, the presence of significant differences between conditions was correlated with individual chunking ability. The findings point at chunking ability as a significant modulator of general L2 processing efficiency, and of cross-language differences in particular, and add clarity to the interpretation of variability in the online reading performance of non-native speakers.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)Successful listening in a second language (L2) involves learning to identify the relevant acoustic–phonetic dimensions that differentiate between words in the L2, and then use these cues to access lexical representations during real-time comprehension. This is a particularly challenging goal to achieve when the relevant acoustic–phonetic dimensions in the L2 differ from those in the L1, as is the case for the L2 acquisition of Mandarin, a tonal language, by speakers of non-tonal languages like English. Previous work shows tone in L2 is perceived less categorically (Shen and Froud, 2019) and weighted less in word recognition (Pelzl et al., 2019) than in L1. However, little is known about the link between categorical perception of tone and use of tone in real time L2 word recognition at the level of the individual learner. This study presents evidence from 30 native and 29 L1-English speakers of Mandarin who completed a real-time spoken word recognition and a tone identification task. Results show that L2 learners differed from native speakers in both the extent to which they perceived tone categorically as well as in their ability to use tonal cues to distinguish between words in real-time comprehension. Critically, learners who reliably distinguished between words differing by tone alone in the word recognition task also showed more categorical perception of tone on the identification task. Moreover, within this group, performance on the two tasks was strongly correlated. This provides the first direct evidence showing that the ability to perceive tone categorically is related to the weighting of tonal cues during spoken word recognition, thus contributing to a better understanding of the link between phonemic and lexical processing, which has been argued to be a key component in the L2 acquisition of tone (Wong and Perrachione, 2007).more » « less
-
Abstract Limited language experience in childhood is common among deaf individuals, which prior research has shown to lead to low levels of language processing. Although basic structures such as word order have been found to be resilient to conditions of sparse language input in early life, whether they are robust to conditions of extreme language delay is unknown. The sentence comprehension strategies of post‐childhood, first‐language (L1) learners of American Sign Language (ASL) with at least 9 years of language experience were investigated, in comparison to two control groups of learners with full access to language from birth (deaf native signers and hearing L2 learners who were native English speakers). The results of a sentence‐to‐picture matching experiment show that event knowledge overrides word order for post‐childhood L1 learners, regardless of the animacy of the subject, while both deaf native signers and hearing L2 signers consistently rely on word order to comprehend sentences. Language inaccessibility throughout early childhood impedes the acquisition of even basic word order. Similar to the strategies used by very young children prior to the development of basic sentence structure, post‐childhood L1 learners rely more on context and event knowledge to comprehend sentences. Language experience during childhood is critical to the development of basic sentence structure.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.15011.gru
