EFFECTS OF FIRST LANGUAGE VOICING RULES ON THE PERCEPTION AND PRODUCTION OF ENGLISH OBSTRUENT SEQUENCES BY ADULT HUNGARIAN AND POLISH LEARNERS OF ENGLISH
Year of Dissertation:
2009
The present study explored difficulties in the acquisition of a second language (L2) phonology, looking specifically at the role of native (L1) voicing rules on L2 perception and production. Hungarian and Polish late learners of English performed production and perception tasks with English voicing contrasts in contexts where Hungarian and Polish voicing rules might interfere. American English speakers also participated, for comparison. Each participant produced sentences containing fictional names with obstruent sequences crossing a word boundary (e.g. I met Gus Barker today). The non-native participants did show evidence of transfer of their native regressive voicing assimilation rules to their productions of English word-final obstruents, although regressive devoicing was observed more often than regressive voicing. Each participant also performed identification tasks with similar sentences (e.g. I met Jess Geller today): a four-choice task containing the entire obstruent sequence, and a two-choice task containing sentences in which either the first or last name had been replaced with silence (e.g. I met Jess [silence] today or I met [silence] Geller today). For word-final obstruents, the non-native listeners were significantly less accurate in the two-choice task than the American English controls, but not significantly different from each other. In the four-choice task, both groups became even less accurate, with the Polish listeners showing a more severe effect than the Hungarian listeners. Overall, there was a slight significant correlation of word-final perception and production scores. For word-initial stops, perception was highly accurate for all groups, with the exception of voiced stops in a voiceless-voiced context. Perception of word-initial /s/ was unexpectedly poor for all three language groups. The pattern of results observed in this study suggests that both L1 phonetic and phonological interference affects perception and production in an L2. Implications for current theoretical models of second language phonology are discussed.
The processing of complex syntax and its relation to non-native reading comprehension
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Via a variety of measurements, 64 Hungarian speaking 12th graders learning English as a second language were tested in a cross-sectional correlational study in order to determine the relationship between the ability to process complex syntax and L2 reading comprehension across two levels of language proficiency. While vocabulary knowledge is considered to be the most important determinant of effective non-native reading comprehension, results of this study showed syntactic comprehension to be a statistically significant estimator for L2 reading comprehension
Acquisition of English verb transitivity by native speakers of Japanese
Year of Dissertation:
2012
This study is concerned with the acquisition of English verb transitivity by native speakers of Japanese. Both a verb's semantic class (Levin, 1993; Pinker, 1989) and its frequency (Ambridge et al., 2008) have been proposed to influence the acquisition of verbs in L1. For example, verbs whose meaning entails change-of-location or change-of-state (e.g., move, roll, bounce, melt) typically participate in the causative alternation in English. In addition, among those verbs, it is predicted that high-frequency verbs such as break and move are acquired earlier than low-frequency ones such as shatter and slide. In SLA, a learnability problem is expected when the usage in L1 constitutes a superset of the usage in L2 (Inagaki, 2001; Montrul, 2001). Such asymmetric relationships exist between English and Japanese when there are idiosyncratic exceptions in a verb semantic class in one language but not the other. For example, inherently-directed motion verbs (e.g., descend, oriru/orosu "descendINTRANSITIVE/TRANSITIVE") and verbs of disappearance (e.g., disappear, kieru/kesu "disappearINTRANSITIVE/TRANSITIVE") are prohibited in the causative alternation in English, but not in Japanese. Thus, a learnability problem in the causative alternation is expected for Japanese ESL leaners. Twenty-six native English speakers and 35 Japanese ESL learners participated in this computer-based experiment. The data, analyzed with mixed-design ANOVA and mixed-effect linear models, show main and interaction effects of the verb's semantic class and the verb's (log) frequency. Post-hoc analyses indicate that the effect of the verb's semantic class was primarily due to the idiosyncratic exceptional semantic classes, as predicted by the asymmetric relationship in SLA. A strong effect of frequency was found for the acquisition of the idiosyncratic exceptional semantic classes, indicating that frequency plays a critical role in acquiring (unlearning) grammatical constructions that exist in L1 but not in L2.
Processing Chinese Empty Categories
Year of Dissertation:
2009
This study investigates empty category (or `gap') interpretation by native Mandarin Chinese speakers. Two research methods (sentence completion and self-paced reading) and four experiments were employed to examine the strategy adopted to assign a reference (or a `filler') to an identified empty category in real-time sentence comprehension. The sentences tested included main clause, clausal subject, clausal object, and relative clause constructions, all of which contained an empty category in subject position (pro, PRO or trace, according to the construction).
Omitted Arguments and Complexity of Predication
Year of Dissertation:
2010
Abstract
Asking Questions in Learner English: First and Second Language Acquisition of Main and Embedded Interrogative Structures
Year of Dissertation:
2011
This dissertation examines how adults and children learning English produce and judge English questions. The ultimate goal of this study is to contribute to an understanding of the extent, nature and causes of learners' persistent difficulties with some syntactic properties of the language they are acquiring.
Effects of L1 Spanish and L2 English sublexical and lexical processing on L2 English word reading speed and accuracy, and reading comprehension
Year of Dissertation:
2012
This study explores the word identification processes used by adult bilingual Spanish/English readers of varying proficiencies in both L1 and L2, and how these relate to reading comprehension levels in L1 and L2. It has been proposed in word reading research that lexical processing (accessing the word directly from the lexicon) is more efficient than sublexical processing (assembling the phonology of a word letter by letter). This investigation is concerned with the type of bilingual processing used by readers of varying ability. Three groups of Spanish/English bilingual readers, who differed across both L1 and L2 in their reading comprehension levels, performed a reading and listening task in both Spanish (Experiment 1) and English (Experiment 2). A third monolingual control group performed the task in their L1, English (Experiment 3). The on-line procedure involved presenting words visually and aurally, for participants to make a yes/no choice as to whether the words match. This bimodal task, not previously used in second language research, presented equal difficulty for readers of all proficiency types. The written words appeared in either uniform (lower) case or alternating (aLtErNaTiNg) case, to test reliance on lexical processing during word identification. Overall, L1 Spanish readers of all proficiency levels used similar strategies for L1 word identification, but the less proficient readers showed this effect when orthographic form was disrupted, i.e., when the stimuli were presented in alternating case. In L2, the less proficient readers tended to rely more on a sublexical strategy, while the high proficiency group used a lexical strategy. Crosslinguistic correlations indicated that readers who showed more disruption (as evidenced by higher reaction times) to alternating case stimuli in L1 Spanish had lower proficiency levels in English, indicating that L1 reading skill influences L2 reading proficiency. These findings combined support dual route models of reading, and have important implications for educational decisions: both sublexical and lexical skills are emergent in L1 and L2, and should be focused on in instructional settings.
Attachment Ambiguities in Hebrew Complex Nominals: Prosody and Parsing
Year of Dissertation:
2009
This dissertation investigates the prosody-syntax interface in two Hebrew complex nominals. Their meaning is identical but their syntax and phonology differ. The free state (FS) nominal is similar to English (e.g., the coach of the wrestler). The construct state (CS) nominal lacks the preposition, has stress on the second noun, and the construction constitutes one phonological word despite its internal syntactic structure. When followed by a relative clause (RC) the two constructions (1a,b) are syntactically/semantically ambiguous in the same way; but they contrast prosodically because one of the phrasing patterns permitted for FS (a boundary between the two nouns) is inhibited for CS.
The Semantics of Adjectives of Quantity
Year of Dissertation:
2009
This work investigates the semantics of the adjectives of quantity (Q-adjectives) many, few, much and little, with the goal of providing a unified semantic analysis of this class, and in doing so exploring the semantics of quantity and degree more broadly.
The acquisition of consonant clusters by Japanese learners of English: Interactions of speech perception and production
Year of Dissertation:
2010
The primary aim of this dissertation was to investigate the relationship between speech perception and speech production difficulties among Japanese second language (L2) learners of English, in their learning complex syllable structures. Japanese L2 learners and American English controls were tested in a categorial ABX discrimination task of nonsense words sequences (e.g., /spani/ vs /sepani/) and included /sp, sk, pl, kl, bl, gl, spl, skl/ clusters. In the second study, production data on these same contrasts were collected by employing the delayed imitation task where speakers were asked to produce the target words in a short sentence. Productions were evaluated by American English listeners. In addition, the Versant test, a short test of English fluency by phone, was administered to see how Japanese participants' present English fluency level would correlate with their performance on the current experiments.