The Acquisition of Community Speech Norms by Asian Immigrants Learning English as a Second Language (original) (raw)
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Stability and change in (ing): Ethnic and grammatical variation over time in Australian English
English World-Wide, 2023
Work on variable (ing) has highlighted its long-term stability and shared conditioning across English varieties. Here, we ask whether similar stability and conditioning holds in Australian English over time and across ethnicity. The data come from sociolinguistic interviews with 204 Australians stratified according to age, gender, social class and ethnicity, drawn from the Sydney Speaks project. Analyses of 13,000 (ing) tokens reveal very low alveolar rates, but generally similar conditioning to that of other English varieties, with the exception of word class, for which variability was initially largely limited to verbal tokens before extending to include the pronouns something and nothing. Ethnic differences are evident in rates of use: Italian Australians evince higher, and Greek and Chinese Australians lower, rates of [n]. These differences are accounted for by class affiliations, suggesting that (ing) may be an ideal variable for considering the interplay between social class and ethnicity.
Proceedings of the 20th international congress of phonetic sciences, 2023
The variation between the alveolar and velar forms (ING) has been widely used in conveying social meanings for native speakers in many English varieties. L2 speakers' perception of (ING), however, remains unknown. The presented study employs a matched guise task exploring Chinese listeners' mental representations of the (ING) variable, and a social network questionnaire, assessing how their associations interact with the levels of integration in the host society. Results from multivariate analysis show that (1) listeners with higher social network strengths perceived the speakers to be less educated, regardless of the (ING) variant; (2) the velar variant was perceived as more educated; (3) speakers' gender, and regional background had greater impacts on listeners' ratings than the (ING) guise.
Patterns and Causes of Deviations in English Verbal Inflectional Suffixes among Thai ELF Learners
3L The Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies, 2018
This study investigates the use of three verbal inflectional suffixes, i.e., the present tenses , the past tense-ed, and the progressive-ing, among Thai ELF learners. It examines how they deviate from ENL norms and the causes of deviations are analysed. Data were taken from the academic writing of 116 English-major students at a university in Bangkok. The results showed that Thai ELF learners who have advanced and upper-intermediate level English knowledge and skills have acquired the ability to use these three suffixes, but they sometimes deviate from ENL norms. They tend to omit the-s ending when there is a long distance between the main subject and main verb, when there is a heavy subject containing a head and pre-/post-modifiers, and when the subject appears as a structurally complex category. They often omit the-ed ending when there are several past tense verbs in a sentence. They extend the use of the progressive aspect to talk about a general truth or habit which is typically expressed by the present simple tense in ENL. Results suggest that linguistic and functional causes are responsible for these deviations. Thai ELF learners use the zero forms of present and past tense verbs as a result of both syntactic complexity and the pragmatic motives of the efficiency of communication as well as the exploitation of redundancy. They use progressive verbs with general truths or habits due to the attractive form and meaning of this aspect and also the pragmatic motive of added prominence.
Purpose: This 5-year longitudinal study investigated the acquisition of 6 English grammatical morphemes (i.e., regular and irregular past tense, 3rd person singular, progressive aspect -ing, copula BE, and auxiliary DO) by 10 native Mandarinspeaking children and adolescents in the United States (arrived in the United States between 5 and 16 years of age). The goals were to chart and compare the acquisition trajectories and levels of mastery across the morphemes, identify when age-related differences emerged and which forms they took. Method: Morphological proficiency was measured by the accuracy of these morphemes in obligatory contexts during spontaneous speech. Results: The morphemes were mastered by different numbers of participants and showed different growth trajectories. Performance variance was partially predicted by age of arrival (AoAr) in the United States, with early arrivals achieving greater proficiency than late arrivals. However, such AoAr effects took several years to occur and only existed for 2 of the 6 morphemes (i.e., 3rd person singular and regular past tense). Growth curve analysis revealed that language environment was a stronger predictor of individual differences than AoAr. Results did not uncover age-related differences in the acquisition of tense versus non-tense-related morphemes, nor in regular versus irregular morphemes, nor in the error types. Conclusion: Findings support an Environmental account for age-related differences in 2nd language (L2) morphological acquisition. Results also indicate that the acquisition of some grammatical morphemes by school-aged immigrants takes several years to complete. As L2 learners exhibit some error types and difficulties similar to monolingual children with specific language impairment, caution needs to be taken when interpreting and using morphological errors as indicators of speech /language learning problems in this population.
Korean Americans as speakers of English: The acquisition of general and regional features
2000
This dissertation addresses Korean Americans as speakers of English and as a unified speech community, exploring the nature and extent of sociolinguistic stratification of the English used by Korean Americans in Philadelphia. The acquisition of three linguistic features is investigated: word-medial /t/ flapping, the use of discourse markers, and the regional feature of Philadelphia short a. Statistical analyses examine these features for the effects of linguistic factors and social factors such as age, sex, occupation, age of arrival in the US, length of stay in the US, and English education. Age of arrival shows a very strong effect on flapping: immigrants who arrived in the US as children and US-born immigrants both showed a very high degree of flapping, while Korean-born adult immigrants acquired flapping to a much lesser degree. Style is also analyzed to determine whether speakers show variation along the formality continuum. In addition to production, the perceptual component of English use by the speakers is examined through a perception test. The perception test, administered to native English speakers, elicits judgments of English nativeness and ethnic identity of the Korean Americans. The results of the perception test are correlated with the production results of the linguistic features. In general, Korean Americans show varying degrees of acquisition of the three features according to sociolinguistic factors. Although the speakers exhibit stylistic variation, they have not acquired the Philadelphia dialectal feature of short a. The perception test reveals that English nativeness is accurately judged but that ethnic identification is problematic for listeners. The correlation of perception and production is positive in that an increase in the presence of the native linguistic features in the speech being judged is correlated with increased perception of the degree of English nativeness. The three features examined are not taught through formal explicit instruction to either native or non-native English speakers, which implies that speakers must engage in face-to-face interaction with native speakers in order to acquire these native speech community norms.
On the structure and acquisition of telicity and unaccusativity in Vietnamese
Taiwan Journal of Linguistics Vol. 19.2, 1-32, 2021. , 2021
In this paper, we investigate Chinese L2 learners' knowledge of two grammatical constraints in Vietnamese: the first, a constraint on the aspectual interpretation of accomplishment predicates, the second pertaining to alternations in the position of embedded subjects in mono-clausal làm causatives. Whereas the former constraint is shared by Vietnamese and Chinese, the two languages differ with respect to the latter. The results of three judgment tasks provide statistically reliable support for the idea that L2 interlanguage grammars are not ultimately limited by L1 patterns; given the absence of explicit teaching and only limited exposure to relevant structures, it is suggested that learners' performance may be guided by UG information.
2016
I hereby declare that this thesis is my original work and it has been written by me in its entirety. I have duly acknowledged all the sources of information which have been used in the thesis. This thesis has also not been submitted for any degree in any university previously." _________________________________ ROWLAND ANTHONY S. IMPERIAL 9 December 2016 I would also like to thank A/P Mie Hiramoto for her kindness and overall amazing-ness. She has been a great pillar of support throughout my two and a half years as a graduate student in the ELL Department. Thanks to the academic and administrative staff at the University of Baguio and MONOL International Educational Institute for letting me into their school grounds, following and chasing after their students like a stalker fan. I would also like to thank my cousin Romana, and Ate Niña, Tita Abette, and Tito Jojo, for helping me out during my three-month stay in Baguio. Without them, this research would not have been possible. Thanks to everyone else in the Department who helped me through school work and admin-related matters (since I'm so bad at admin stuff), and made grad school fun-filled and awesome. Special thanks go out to my awesome grad research roommates and drinking buddies
In the present study we use the South Asian and Southeast Asian components of the International Corpus of English (ICE) as well as a larger set of web-derived newspaper corpora in order to account for similarities and differences in the use of the progressive in eight non-native varieties of English (Singapore, Hong Kong, Indian, Sri Lankan, Bangladeshi, Maldivian, Nepali and Pakistani English). The analysis is two-fold: First, for the varieties under scrutiny, we provide a quantitative overview of the different use of progressive aspect marking according to tense and voice. Second, we apply a cluster analysis in order to determine respective variety-based clusters so that a comparison of those verbs of which progressive aspect marking is said to differ most significantly, will be feasible. In a third step we present examples of some of the most influential verbs that are responsible for the differences in usage across the corpora.
A Study of Pragmatic Change in the Vietnamese of Second Generation Speakers in Queensland, Australia
2013
Language contact, bilingualism and contact-induced language change have created controversial issues among linguists as more and more people of different languages and cultures around the world come into contact. There have been studies of the phenomena of language change including code switching, code mixing, interference, transference, and convergence in different language dyads (Clyne, 2003), especially in multi-lingual societies like Australia, the United States of America and Canada. However, there is insufficient research into the Vietnamese language used in Australia and its changes in comparison with Vietnamese used in Vietnam. This empirical study, therefore, investigates the patterns of pragmatic transference in spoken Vietnamese used by the second generation speakers in Australia who are English-Vietnamese bilinguals. The basic hypothesis of this thesis is that the formulae of pragmatic speech acts in spoken Vietnamese used by the second generation and their lack of knowl...