Task-effects in the L2 perception and production of English sentence types by L1 Spanish speakers (original) (raw)
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Perception and Production of Sentence Types by Inuktitut-English Bilinguals
Languages
We explore the perception and production of English statements, absolute yes-no questions, and declarative questions by Inuktitut-English sequential bilinguals. Inuktitut does not mark stress, and intonation is used as a cue for phrasing, while statements and questions are morphologically marked by a suffix added to the verbal root. Conversely, English absolute questions are both prosodically and syntactically marked, whereas the difference between statements and declarative questions is prosodic. To determine the degree of crosslinguistic influence (CLI) and whether CLI is more prevalent in tasks that require access to contextual information, bilinguals and controls performed three perception and two production tasks, with varying degrees of context. Results showed that bilinguals did not differ from controls in their perception of low-pass filtered utterances but diverged in contextualized tasks. In production, bilinguals, as opposed to controls, displayed a reduced use of pitch i...
Cuza & Frank (2011)
This study examines the role of transfer from English in the acquisition of double-que questions in Spanish among 17 heritage speakers in the US. Results from an elicited production task, an acceptability judgment task and a preference task revealed significant difficulties in the production and acceptability of double-que questions. In contrast with interface vulnerability approaches suggesting no difficulties at the syntax-semantics interface, the participants showed a decreased level of use of double-que structures and no distinction in their acceptability of statements versus questions. However, results from the preference task showed sensitivity to double-que questions among 10 of 17 heritage speakers. It appears that only when the two structures are presented together were the heritage speakers able to perceive the semantic shift introduced by the double-que. The results suggest that transfer from the other language prevents the complete acquisition of these properties even at high levels of bilingual proficiency.
In this paper, we propose a study of the final contours and the prosodic structure observed in yes-no questions in French as an L2. Our study consists in a cross-comparison of utterances recorded in French and Spanish in various settings, and produced by 15 Mexican Spanish learners of French (L2), 10 French speakers and 10 Mexican speakers. In the learner s’ productions, the intonational structure obtained may display some characteristics of their L1: (i) the final contour consists in an extra-high F0 rise, and (ii) the internal prosodic structure at the level of the Prosodic Word (PWD) is not clearly marked. By contrast, in the utterances realized by the French native speakers, it is clear that the form of the final contour is less important than phrasing. These findings prove that the acquisition of phrasing is more important than the acquisition of tonal patterns in French as an L2.
Increasing context: L2 production of English intonation by L1 Mandarin and L1 Spanish speakers
2015
One of the uncontested linguistic uses of intonation is the marking of sentence-type. Intonation, however, can be a redundant cue to sentence type, as in English statements or absolute yes-no questions, or the only cue, as in declarative questions. We explore the realization of sentence prosody by advanced Spanish and Mandarin learners of English. Since the target-like realization of sentence prosody involves the acquisition of phonetic and semantic properties, we compared the production of statements, absolute questions and declarative questions of the experimental groups using an elicited imitation task and a contextual sentence production task that differed in the amount of contextual information provided. Both tasks yielded different patterns of cross-linguistic influence. In the elicited imitation task, differences were restricted to the phonetic realization of pitch accents. In the second task, syntactic (merger of two questions) and phonetic differences (pitch excursion size)...
Subject Position and Information Structure in L2 Spanish
Information structure imposes changes in word order in Spanish. As a result, constituents introducing new information in discourse tend to appear in final position, where they receive prosodic prominence. English speakers, on the other hand, modify the prosodic contour to mark the status of information. The constraints regulating the realization of focus constituents can be either syntactic (e.g. in the expression of broad focus with unaccusative verbs) or pragmatic (e.g. in the realization of subject focus). Given the cross-linguistic differences between English and Spanish, several studies have examined how production is affected by the L1. Using contextualized production and acceptability judgment tasks including question-answer pairs, these studies have shown that only advanced speakers accept and produce post-verbal subjects in contexts of s ubject focus, or in broad focus contexts with unaccusative verbs. In the present study, the acceptability of pre-verbal and post-verbal subjects is compared considering different discursive contexts (i.e. broad focus, VP focus, and subject focus) but presenting only one possibility (SV(O) or V(O)S). Three groups, of 14 participants each, took part of the study: native speakers, intermediate learners, and advanced learners. Using two-way repeated measures ANOVA's and paired t-tests, we were able to conclude that advanced speakers behave in a more native-like manner than intermediate learners, disfavoring post-verbal subjects in contexts of VP focus, as well as in contexts of broad focus with unergative and transitive verbs. Non-native speakers, nonetheless, are not capable of blocking the acceptability of pre-verbal subjects in those contexts where native speakers disfavor them (e.g. broad focus with unaccusative verbs and in contexts of subject focus). Furthermore, the results show that learners do not only favor the L1 rule; they also overgeneralize the L2 rule in infelicitous contexts. The findings are interpreted within the Multiple Grammars Model.
RAEL Revista Electrónica de Lingüística Aplicada, 2013
Research has shown that adult learners of L2 Spanish whose L1 is a non-null subject language know from relatively early that null and postverbal subjects are allowed in Spanish. However, the properties that constrain the native use of subjects at the syntaxdiscourse interface tend to cause persistent difficulty. This study explores the development of both syntactic and discourse subject properties of three level groups of British adult L2 Spanish learners in an instructional setting through a contextualised judgement task. Results show that adult L2 learners of Spanish acquire the relevant L2 feature specifications which constrain purely syntactic contrasts but present a delay in the discourse subject properties, particularly in the interpretation of backward anaphora in null/overt pronominal subjects in embedded clauses and the presentational focus/neutral environment distinction in postverbal subjects with unergative and unaccusative verbs. Processing difficulties and lack of positive evidence in the type of input present in instructional settings might explain the results.
2018
This paper explores the role of cross-linguistic influence and task type in the realization of pitch accents and nuclear contours across English sentence types (statements, absolute questions and declarative questions) by sequential Inuktitut-English bilinguals. In Inuktitut, intonation is mainly a cue for phrasing; i.e., boundary tones are mapped to finality vs. continuity in turn-taking [1,2]. Questions are morphologically marked [3], and while a rising intonation may also be used, it is not always present. In contrast, English absolute questions are syntactically marked, whereas the difference between statements and declarative questions is purely prosodic. Participants performed two tasks: a delayed imitation task, and a contextualized production task. Results revealed that bilinguals differed from controls in the type and phonetic realization of the first pitch accent (but not the nuclear contour), displaying a reduced use of pitch. In the semi-spontaneous task, bilinguals differed from controls in the number of non-target-like realizations, particularly in contexts that prompted declarative questions. We argue that these findings demonstrate clear patterns of prosodic and morpho-syntactic cross-linguistic influence, as well as the importance of incorporating contextual information as a variable [4].
The pragmatic function of intonation in L2 discourse: English tag questions used by Spanish speakers
Intercultural Pragmatics, 2005
The present article discusses the pragmatic role of intonation in crosscultural interactions. It investigates whether the choice of tone and pitch accent in the spoken discourse produced by Spanish learners of English can lead to deficient appropriateness, a concept that can be defined as the choice of ''the most adequate element-where element is understood at any linguistic level-in the realization of a certain function in a specific context'' (Romero Trillo 2001: 531). The study analyzes short read-alouds and Spanish learners' spontaneous conversations and compares them to native English speakers' production in order to interpret the pragmatic meaning expressed by their intonation patterns (cf. Benson et al. 1988; Halliday 1994; Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg 1990). A cross-linguistic corpus was compiled by recording native and non-native speakers who performed short dialogues in English. The corpus data were analyzed and annotated in order to obtain detailed and quantitative comparable information on the two language user groups' prosodic characteristics. The results reveal the existence of significant di¤erences in the choice of the tone and pitch accent by nonnative and native English speakers in similar contexts. These di¤erences may cause communicative misunderstanding.
Processing strategies by beginning l2 learners of English and Spanish: a crosslinguistic study
2013
A central issue in second language acquisition (SLA) research is the relationship between morphosyntactic and lexical-semantic knowledge among L2 learners. It has been proposed that, L2 language acquisition starts with transfer of L1 semantic and morphosyntactic processing strategies; however, it has been observed that, at lower proficiency levels, the language processor may not have sufficient resources to transfer and use L1 morphosyntactic cues such as inflectional morphology, case markers, etc. to process the L2. Therefore, this dissertation investigates whether L2 learners default to more local and lexical-semantic parsing (i.e. universal parsing) at the beginning stages of second language acquisition. This dissertation examines the processing strategies of two groups of L2 learners (L1 English – L2 Spanish and L1 Spanish – L2 English) on two experimental tasks: a self-paced listening task and a sentence interpretation task. The results suggest that L1 transfer may not occur at the beginning stages of acquisition; that is, the beginning L2 learners in this study were not able to process inflectional morphology and agreement cues; thus, they did not demonstrated the ability to integrate grammatical information encoded in verbal morphology in real time processing. Instead, the results indicated that L2 learners, regardless of L1, defaulted to local and lexical-semantic strategies (e.g., first-noun strategy) to process the L2 at the beginning stages of acquisition. These results lend support to the first noun principle (VanPatten 2007) and are discussed in term of the representational and processing problem of L2 acquisition. Implications for models of L2 sentence processing (Input Processing and the Competition Model) are also presented in this dissertation.
In this study we investigate how prosody interacts with word order in the expression of interrogativity in different varieties of two Ibero-Romance languages, Catalan and Spanish. We analyze a corpus obtained by means of the Discourse Completion Task Methodology. The collected data were prosodically and syntactically annotated and show that the absence of syntactic marking (wh-word, subject-verb inversion or subject dislocation) for questions tends to correspond to a more salient intonational marking. Thus, wh-questions favor general falling intonational patterns. By contrast, yes-no questions can be classified depending on the nuclear tone (with preference for low tones in Catalan and high tones in Spanish) and final tone (low for language varieties with subject inversion or dislocation, but optionally high for those that do not present syntactic marking in a mandatory way).