Usha Lakshmanan - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Usha Lakshmanan
Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, May 5, 2022
The present study examines the evidence for accessibility to Universal Grammar (UG) in the interl... more The present study examines the evidence for accessibility to Universal Grammar (UG) in the interlanguage of four children (two Spanish speakers, a Japanese speaker, and a French speaker) acquiring English as a second language. Specifically, the study investigates whether these child second language (L2) learners had access to a posited principle of UG, the Morphological Uniformity Principle (MUP) proposed by Jaeggli and Safir (1987). The MUP provides a unified linguistic account of apparently disparate language facts--null subjects and verb inflections. The MUP states that null subjects are licensed only in languages which have uniform verb paradigms that is, either all the forms or none of the forms are inflected. Examples of such languages are Spanish, Italian, Japanese and Chinese. Languages such as English and French, which have non-uniform verb paradigms (i.e. irregular inflections), do not license null subjects. Certain precise and testable claims for language development are implied by the MUP. Specifically, the MUP predicts that null subjects should occur only in those child grammars which have morphologically uniform verb paradigms but not in those which have morphologically non-uniform verb paradigms. Hyams (1986, 1987) and Guilfoyle (1984) among others, have claimed that the null subject phenomenon is a universal property of child language. The present research tested Hyams' and Jaeggli's predictions in the ILs of the four child subjects. The findings do not indicate any strong evidence for child L2 learners' accessibility to the MUP. The claims for a Universal status for the MUP are thus questioned. It is argued that alternative explanations based on a combination of perceptual factors and the nature of the L1 can account for the occurrence and non-occurrence of null subjects in the IL of the three subjects who did not support Hyams and Jaeggli's claims. Individual variation, arising from three major factors, would also partially explain the differences observed in the IL of the four subjects. The findings of the study have several implications for L2 learners' accessibility to UG. A major implication relates to the problems involved in successfully addressing the question of access to UG in the L2. Possible lines of investigation, which are intended to overcome these problems, are proposed for future SLA research. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.)Ph.D.LinguisticsUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/162482/1/9013950.pd
Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 1993
English Around the World is a comprehensive collection of articles documenting the variation and ... more English Around the World is a comprehensive collection of articles documenting the variation and change that English has undergone in form and function and continues to undergo on a
Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 1996
interlocutor-initiated error detection in the NL context (Norrick), a discussion of transcribers ... more interlocutor-initiated error detection in the NL context (Norrick), a discussion of transcribers as the locus of problems in transcription (O'Connell and Kowal), a treatment of the way that speakers handle "experiential disorders" in narration (Treichel), a study of the problems of written production among historians (Peterson), and a discussion of whether semiotics has been replaced by modern cognitive science (Noth). Another shortcoming of this volume is that it does not have an index, not even a short one. Otherwise, the volume appears to be fairly well done. If the price were somewhat lower, 1 might even buy a copy.
Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 1999
The last thirty years have witnessed considerable research in the fields of second language acqui... more The last thirty years have witnessed considerable research in the fields of second language acquisition (SLA) and second language teaching (SLT). However, most of this research has been concerned with second languages such as English, Spanish, French, and German. There has been comparatively little research on the less commonly taught second languages such as Hindi and other South Asian languages. As the editor states in the preface, enrollment in courses on South Asian languages has rapidly grown in universities in the United States and there is an urgent need for a careful examination of the issues relevant to the teaching and learning of these languages. The purpose of the book is to fill the existing gap and to generate an interest among both researchers and practitioners in the teaching and learning of South Asian languages.
Language Acquisition, 1993
This work examines the developing second language (L2) grammar of a 4-year-old girl who was a nat... more This work examines the developing second language (L2) grammar of a 4-year-old girl who was a native speaker of Spanish and who acquired English as an L2. The evidence suggests that, in contrast to some recent proposals for child first-language acquisition, in the case of child L2 acquisition, nonthematic properties such as Case and INFL systems appear to be operative from the beginning. Three types of evidence are presented. One piece of evidence relates to the early emergence of the copula. A second piece of evidence concerns verbless utterances containing "for." It is proposed that there is an implicit verb in these utterances and that Case theoretic reasons force movement of the post-verbal object to a pre-verbal position. In this position, the object is assigned Case by "for," which is held to be in INFL. A third piece of evidence concerns complement clauses of "want." Although the subject has difficulties in determining that "want" is an Exceptional Case Marking verb, the data suggest that she knows and obeys the Case filter. Extensive notes are appended; contains 45 references.
Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 2013
that the notion of investment must include the ways in which people invest (at times, simultaneou... more that the notion of investment must include the ways in which people invest (at times, simultaneously) in ideologies, representations, spaces, discourses (from family members, educational institutions, peers, media, texts, etc.), and attachments of languages and language learning (as a system and as a practice); how we become engaged and invested in the appropriation of words, and more importantly, how aware we are of our own investments in social categories, ideologies, and representations of the social world in relation to certain ways of being, doing, and thinking. (190)
Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 1995
Recent advances in linguistic theory within the principles and parameters framework have exerted ... more Recent advances in linguistic theory within the principles and parameters framework have exerted considerable influence on the field of second language acquisition. SLA researchers working within this framework of syntactic theory have investigated the extent to which developing second language grammars are constrained by principles of Universal Grammar (UG). Much of the UG-based SLA research in the 1980s focused on adult L2 acquisition, but the role of UG principles in child L2 acquisition remained largely unexplored. More recently, however, this state of affairs has begun to change as SLA researchers are becoming more and more interested in child second language syntactic development. In this paper, I review recent and current developments in UG-based child SLA research, and I argue that child SLA has a valuable role to play in enabling us to arrive at a better understanding of the role of biological factors in language acquisition and in strengthening the links between SLA and li...
Second Language Research, 1994
In this article we examine the development of the complementizer system in child L2 grammars of E... more In this article we examine the development of the complementizer system in child L2 grammars of English, and we show that C and its maximal projection CP are operative from the very beginning. Next, we focus on the development of the tensed complementizer that. We provide evidence which suggests that the tensed complementizer in embedded declaratives may be treated as an obligatorily null complementizer by these child L2 learners. We then examine restrictive relative clauses produced by our subjects. The evidence indicates that the tensed complementizer is first realized overtly as that in the relative clause domain. We speculate on the possible reasons as to why the relative clause domain should trigger the emergence of the overt tensed complementizer and we argue that recent proposals by Rizzi (1990) for a typology of complementizer types enable us to account for these child L2 developmental facts.
Cross-linguistically, languages differ with respect to whether or not they instantiate overt WH-m... more Cross-linguistically, languages differ with respect to whether or not they instantiate overt WH-movement. For example, in WH-questions in languages such as Chinese and Korean, there is no overt WH-movement and a WH-phrase can remain in situ, in the same position as it appears in the
Recently, there has been a spate of L2 research on the learnability problems associated with the ... more Recently, there has been a spate of L2 research on the learnability problems associated with the acquisition of unaccusative verbs, which along with unergative verbs, comprise the two sub-classes of intransitive verbs. Recent L2 research has also investigated the status of the unergative-unaccusative distinction in L2 grammars. A substantial body of previous L2 research in this area has focused on the acquisition of English unaccusatives by learners from different L1 backgrounds, such as Chinese (Balcom, 1997; Yip, 1995), Japanese (Hirakawa, 2003, 1995; Oshita, 2000, 1997), Italian (Oshita, 1997) or Spanish (Oshita, 1997). To our knowledge, however, there have been hardly any studies (except for J.-H. Song, 2000) on the L2 acquisition of English unaccusative verbs by native speakers of Korean. Furthermore, to our knowledge, there have been no studies on the unaccusative-unergative distinction in the English interlanguage of native speakers of Korean. This paper addresses the issue o...
Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 1992
Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics
We examined gender assignment patterns in the speech of Spanish/English bilingual children, payin... more We examined gender assignment patterns in the speech of Spanish/English bilingual children, paying particular attention to the influence of three gender assignment strategies (i.e., analogical gender, masculine default gender, phonological gender) that have been proposed to constrain the gender assignment process in Spanish/English bilingual speech. Our analysis was based on monolingual Spanish nominals (n = 1774), which served as a comparative baseline, and Spanish/English mixed nominal constructions (n = 220) extracted from oral narratives produced by 40 child bilinguals of different grade levels (second graders vs. fifth graders) and instructional programs (English immersion vs. two-way bilingual) from Miami Dade, Florida. The narratives, available in the CHILDES database (MacWhinney, Brian. 2000. The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk, 3rd edn. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates), were collected by Pearson, Barbara Z. 2002. Narrative competence among monolingual and ...
Journal of Cognition and Culture
A debate is underway regarding the perceptual and cognitive benefits of bilingualism and musical ... more A debate is underway regarding the perceptual and cognitive benefits of bilingualism and musical experience. This study contributes to the debate by investigating auditory inhibitory control in English-speaking monolingual musicians, non-musicians, tone language bilinguals, and non-tone language bilinguals. We predicted that musicians and tone language bilinguals would demonstrate enhanced processing relative to monolinguals and other bilinguals. Groups of monolinguals (N = 22), monolingual musicians (N = 19), non-tone language bilinguals (N = 20) and tone language bilinguals (N = 18) were compared on auditory Stroop tasks to assess domain-transferable processing benefits (e.g. auditory inhibitory control) resulting from potentially shared underlying cognitive mechanisms (Patel, 2003; Bialystok & DePape, 2009). In one task, participants heard the words “high” and “low” presented in high or low pitches, and responded regarding the pitch of the stimuli as quickly as possible. In anoth...
Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, May 5, 2022
The present study examines the evidence for accessibility to Universal Grammar (UG) in the interl... more The present study examines the evidence for accessibility to Universal Grammar (UG) in the interlanguage of four children (two Spanish speakers, a Japanese speaker, and a French speaker) acquiring English as a second language. Specifically, the study investigates whether these child second language (L2) learners had access to a posited principle of UG, the Morphological Uniformity Principle (MUP) proposed by Jaeggli and Safir (1987). The MUP provides a unified linguistic account of apparently disparate language facts--null subjects and verb inflections. The MUP states that null subjects are licensed only in languages which have uniform verb paradigms that is, either all the forms or none of the forms are inflected. Examples of such languages are Spanish, Italian, Japanese and Chinese. Languages such as English and French, which have non-uniform verb paradigms (i.e. irregular inflections), do not license null subjects. Certain precise and testable claims for language development are implied by the MUP. Specifically, the MUP predicts that null subjects should occur only in those child grammars which have morphologically uniform verb paradigms but not in those which have morphologically non-uniform verb paradigms. Hyams (1986, 1987) and Guilfoyle (1984) among others, have claimed that the null subject phenomenon is a universal property of child language. The present research tested Hyams' and Jaeggli's predictions in the ILs of the four child subjects. The findings do not indicate any strong evidence for child L2 learners' accessibility to the MUP. The claims for a Universal status for the MUP are thus questioned. It is argued that alternative explanations based on a combination of perceptual factors and the nature of the L1 can account for the occurrence and non-occurrence of null subjects in the IL of the three subjects who did not support Hyams and Jaeggli's claims. Individual variation, arising from three major factors, would also partially explain the differences observed in the IL of the four subjects. The findings of the study have several implications for L2 learners' accessibility to UG. A major implication relates to the problems involved in successfully addressing the question of access to UG in the L2. Possible lines of investigation, which are intended to overcome these problems, are proposed for future SLA research. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.)Ph.D.LinguisticsUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/162482/1/9013950.pd
Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 1993
English Around the World is a comprehensive collection of articles documenting the variation and ... more English Around the World is a comprehensive collection of articles documenting the variation and change that English has undergone in form and function and continues to undergo on a
Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 1996
interlocutor-initiated error detection in the NL context (Norrick), a discussion of transcribers ... more interlocutor-initiated error detection in the NL context (Norrick), a discussion of transcribers as the locus of problems in transcription (O'Connell and Kowal), a treatment of the way that speakers handle "experiential disorders" in narration (Treichel), a study of the problems of written production among historians (Peterson), and a discussion of whether semiotics has been replaced by modern cognitive science (Noth). Another shortcoming of this volume is that it does not have an index, not even a short one. Otherwise, the volume appears to be fairly well done. If the price were somewhat lower, 1 might even buy a copy.
Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 1999
The last thirty years have witnessed considerable research in the fields of second language acqui... more The last thirty years have witnessed considerable research in the fields of second language acquisition (SLA) and second language teaching (SLT). However, most of this research has been concerned with second languages such as English, Spanish, French, and German. There has been comparatively little research on the less commonly taught second languages such as Hindi and other South Asian languages. As the editor states in the preface, enrollment in courses on South Asian languages has rapidly grown in universities in the United States and there is an urgent need for a careful examination of the issues relevant to the teaching and learning of these languages. The purpose of the book is to fill the existing gap and to generate an interest among both researchers and practitioners in the teaching and learning of South Asian languages.
Language Acquisition, 1993
This work examines the developing second language (L2) grammar of a 4-year-old girl who was a nat... more This work examines the developing second language (L2) grammar of a 4-year-old girl who was a native speaker of Spanish and who acquired English as an L2. The evidence suggests that, in contrast to some recent proposals for child first-language acquisition, in the case of child L2 acquisition, nonthematic properties such as Case and INFL systems appear to be operative from the beginning. Three types of evidence are presented. One piece of evidence relates to the early emergence of the copula. A second piece of evidence concerns verbless utterances containing "for." It is proposed that there is an implicit verb in these utterances and that Case theoretic reasons force movement of the post-verbal object to a pre-verbal position. In this position, the object is assigned Case by "for," which is held to be in INFL. A third piece of evidence concerns complement clauses of "want." Although the subject has difficulties in determining that "want" is an Exceptional Case Marking verb, the data suggest that she knows and obeys the Case filter. Extensive notes are appended; contains 45 references.
Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 2013
that the notion of investment must include the ways in which people invest (at times, simultaneou... more that the notion of investment must include the ways in which people invest (at times, simultaneously) in ideologies, representations, spaces, discourses (from family members, educational institutions, peers, media, texts, etc.), and attachments of languages and language learning (as a system and as a practice); how we become engaged and invested in the appropriation of words, and more importantly, how aware we are of our own investments in social categories, ideologies, and representations of the social world in relation to certain ways of being, doing, and thinking. (190)
Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 1995
Recent advances in linguistic theory within the principles and parameters framework have exerted ... more Recent advances in linguistic theory within the principles and parameters framework have exerted considerable influence on the field of second language acquisition. SLA researchers working within this framework of syntactic theory have investigated the extent to which developing second language grammars are constrained by principles of Universal Grammar (UG). Much of the UG-based SLA research in the 1980s focused on adult L2 acquisition, but the role of UG principles in child L2 acquisition remained largely unexplored. More recently, however, this state of affairs has begun to change as SLA researchers are becoming more and more interested in child second language syntactic development. In this paper, I review recent and current developments in UG-based child SLA research, and I argue that child SLA has a valuable role to play in enabling us to arrive at a better understanding of the role of biological factors in language acquisition and in strengthening the links between SLA and li...
Second Language Research, 1994
In this article we examine the development of the complementizer system in child L2 grammars of E... more In this article we examine the development of the complementizer system in child L2 grammars of English, and we show that C and its maximal projection CP are operative from the very beginning. Next, we focus on the development of the tensed complementizer that. We provide evidence which suggests that the tensed complementizer in embedded declaratives may be treated as an obligatorily null complementizer by these child L2 learners. We then examine restrictive relative clauses produced by our subjects. The evidence indicates that the tensed complementizer is first realized overtly as that in the relative clause domain. We speculate on the possible reasons as to why the relative clause domain should trigger the emergence of the overt tensed complementizer and we argue that recent proposals by Rizzi (1990) for a typology of complementizer types enable us to account for these child L2 developmental facts.
Cross-linguistically, languages differ with respect to whether or not they instantiate overt WH-m... more Cross-linguistically, languages differ with respect to whether or not they instantiate overt WH-movement. For example, in WH-questions in languages such as Chinese and Korean, there is no overt WH-movement and a WH-phrase can remain in situ, in the same position as it appears in the
Recently, there has been a spate of L2 research on the learnability problems associated with the ... more Recently, there has been a spate of L2 research on the learnability problems associated with the acquisition of unaccusative verbs, which along with unergative verbs, comprise the two sub-classes of intransitive verbs. Recent L2 research has also investigated the status of the unergative-unaccusative distinction in L2 grammars. A substantial body of previous L2 research in this area has focused on the acquisition of English unaccusatives by learners from different L1 backgrounds, such as Chinese (Balcom, 1997; Yip, 1995), Japanese (Hirakawa, 2003, 1995; Oshita, 2000, 1997), Italian (Oshita, 1997) or Spanish (Oshita, 1997). To our knowledge, however, there have been hardly any studies (except for J.-H. Song, 2000) on the L2 acquisition of English unaccusative verbs by native speakers of Korean. Furthermore, to our knowledge, there have been no studies on the unaccusative-unergative distinction in the English interlanguage of native speakers of Korean. This paper addresses the issue o...
Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 1992
Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics
We examined gender assignment patterns in the speech of Spanish/English bilingual children, payin... more We examined gender assignment patterns in the speech of Spanish/English bilingual children, paying particular attention to the influence of three gender assignment strategies (i.e., analogical gender, masculine default gender, phonological gender) that have been proposed to constrain the gender assignment process in Spanish/English bilingual speech. Our analysis was based on monolingual Spanish nominals (n = 1774), which served as a comparative baseline, and Spanish/English mixed nominal constructions (n = 220) extracted from oral narratives produced by 40 child bilinguals of different grade levels (second graders vs. fifth graders) and instructional programs (English immersion vs. two-way bilingual) from Miami Dade, Florida. The narratives, available in the CHILDES database (MacWhinney, Brian. 2000. The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk, 3rd edn. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates), were collected by Pearson, Barbara Z. 2002. Narrative competence among monolingual and ...
Journal of Cognition and Culture
A debate is underway regarding the perceptual and cognitive benefits of bilingualism and musical ... more A debate is underway regarding the perceptual and cognitive benefits of bilingualism and musical experience. This study contributes to the debate by investigating auditory inhibitory control in English-speaking monolingual musicians, non-musicians, tone language bilinguals, and non-tone language bilinguals. We predicted that musicians and tone language bilinguals would demonstrate enhanced processing relative to monolinguals and other bilinguals. Groups of monolinguals (N = 22), monolingual musicians (N = 19), non-tone language bilinguals (N = 20) and tone language bilinguals (N = 18) were compared on auditory Stroop tasks to assess domain-transferable processing benefits (e.g. auditory inhibitory control) resulting from potentially shared underlying cognitive mechanisms (Patel, 2003; Bialystok & DePape, 2009). In one task, participants heard the words “high” and “low” presented in high or low pitches, and responded regarding the pitch of the stimuli as quickly as possible. In anoth...