Grs LX 700 Language Acquisition and Linguistic Theory Week Transfer and the “initial state” for L2A. And other things

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New parameter settings

And then EFM proceed to report that Japanese speakers (J>L2E) don’t significantly prefer preverbal adverbial clauses (purported SOV preference), and even eventually prefer postverbal adverbial clauses (purported SVO preference).
But preferences are not parameter settings in any obvious way. Nothing is ruled out in any event—this is not a very useful result (see also Schwartz’s response).

Martohardjono 1993

Interesting test of relative judgments.
It is generally agreed that ECP violations…

Which waiter did the man leave the table after spilled the soup?

are worse than Subjacency violations

Which patient did Max explain how the poison killed?

Do L2’ers get these kinds of judgments?

Martohardjono 1993

Turns out, yeah, they seem to.
But it turns out that speakers of languages without overt wh-movement had lower accuracy on judging the violations overall.
So: L1 has some effect (although EFM don’t really talk about this much, something which occupies much of the peer reviewers’ time).
EFM suggest that these judgments cannot be coming from the L1 alone, but of course this also relies on the view that L1 is significantly impoverished by “instantiation” (not the common view, not even in 1996).

EFM’s experiment

Elicited imitation, Japanese speakers learning English (33 kids, 18 adults).
Trying to elicit sentences with things associated with functional categories (tense marking, modals, do-support for IP; topicalization, relative clauses, wh-questions for CP).
The point was actually more to refute the idea that adults have UG “turned off” after a “critical period” than anything else (a discussion we’ll return to)

EFM’s experiment

Kids did equally well in this repetition task as adults.
Kids seemed to get around 70% success on IP-related things, around 50% success on CP-related things. The deeper topicalizations are harder than shallower topicalizations.
EFM would have you believe:

Based on their data collapsing over all kids and over all adults, there are no stages.
CP is there just as much as IP is there, despite the higher success with IP, just because CP-related structures are intrinsically harder/more complex.

It could be true, but it’s certainly not a knock-down argument against V&YS or any of the other alternatives.
Also, as White (2003) notes, none of these sentences were ungrammatical (which we might have expected to be “repaired” under repetition)… if this is even a reliable task to begin with.

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 
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 
 
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L2A and UG

We can ask many of the same questions we asked about syntax, but of phonology.
Learners have an interlanguage grammar of phonology as well.

Is this grammar primarily a product of transfer?
Can parameters be set for the target language values?
Do interlanguage phonologies act like real languages (constrained by UG)?

Here, it it rather obvious just from our anecdotal experience with the world that transfer plays a big role and parameters are hard to set (to a value different from the L1’s value).

Phonological interference

If L1’ers lose the ability to hear a contrast not in the L1, there is a strong possibility that the L1 phonology filters the L2 input.
L2’ers may not be getting the same data as L1’ers. Even if the LAD were still working, it would be getting different data.
If you don’t perceive the contrast, you won’t acquire the contrast.

Phonological features

Phonologists over the years have come up with a system of (universal) features that differentiate between sounds.

/p/ vs. /b/ differ in [+voice].
/p/ vs. /f/ differ in [+continuant].
…

What L1’ers seem to be doing is determining which features contrast in the language. If the language doesn’t distinguish voiced from voiceless consonants, L1’ers come to ignore [±voice].

Phonological features, filtering

Brown (2000): Presented pairs of nonwords to speakers of Japanese, Korean, Mandarin.
Japanese and Korean speakers didn’t perceive the l ~ r contrast, Mandarin speakers did, although none of the languages has an l ~ r contrast.
However, Mandarin does have other segments which differ in [+coronal] ([r]), so Mandarin speakers do need to distinguish [±coronal] elsewhere.

Phonological features, filtering

Han (1992). Japanese distinguishes geminate from non-geminate stops (consonant length; k vs. kk, e.g., black owl vs. black cat). English doesn’t (*kkat vs. kat).
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Grs LX 700 Language Acquisition and Linguistic Theory Week Transfer and the “initial state” for L2A. And other things

New parameter settings

And then EFM proceed to report that Japanese speakers (J>L2E) don’t significantly prefer preverbal adverbial clauses (purported SOV preference), and even eventually prefer postverbal adverbial clauses (purported SVO preference).

But preferences are not parameter settings in any obvious way. Nothing is ruled out in any event—this is not a very useful result (see also Schwartz’s response).

Martohardjono 1993

Interesting test of relative judgments.

It is generally agreed that ECP violations…

are worse than Subjacency violations

Do L2’ers get these kinds of judgments?

Martohardjono 1993

Turns out, yeah, they seem to.

But it turns out that speakers of languages without overt wh-movement had lower accuracy on judging the violations overall.

So: L1 has some effect (although EFM don’t really talk about this much, something which occupies much of the peer reviewers’ time).

EFM suggest that these judgments cannot be coming from the L1 alone, but of course this also relies on the view that L1 is significantly impoverished by “instantiation” (not the common view, not even in 1996).

EFM’s experiment

Elicited imitation, Japanese speakers learning English (33 kids, 18 adults).

Trying to elicit sentences with things associated with functional categories (tense marking, modals, do-support for IP; topicalization, relative clauses, wh-questions for CP).

The point was actually more to refute the idea that adults have UG “turned off” after a “critical period” than anything else (a discussion we’ll return to)

EFM’s experiment

Kids did equally well in this repetition task as adults.

Kids seemed to get around 70% success on IP-related things, around 50% success on CP-related things. The deeper topicalizations are harder than shallower topicalizations.

EFM would have you believe:

It could be true, but it’s certainly not a knock-down argument against V&YS or any of the other alternatives.

Also, as White (2003) notes, none of these sentences were ungrammatical (which we might have expected to be “repaired” under repetition)… if this is even a reliable task to begin with.



 



 

 





L2A and UG

We can ask many of the same questions we asked about syntax, but of phonology.

Learners have an interlanguage grammar of phonology as well.

Here, it it rather obvious just from our anecdotal experience with the world that transfer plays a big role and parameters are hard to set (to a value different from the L1’s value).

Phonological interference

If L1’ers lose the ability to hear a contrast not in the L1, there is a strong possibility that the L1 phonology filters the L2 input.

L2’ers may not be getting the same data as L1’ers. Even if the LAD were still working, it would be getting different data.

If you don’t perceive the contrast, you won’t acquire the contrast.

Phonological features

Phonologists over the years have come up with a system of (universal) features that differentiate between sounds.

What L1’ers seem to be doing is determining which features contrast in the language. If the language doesn’t distinguish voiced from voiceless consonants, L1’ers come to ignore [±voice].

Phonological features, filtering

Brown (2000): Presented pairs of nonwords to speakers of Japanese, Korean, Mandarin.

Japanese and Korean speakers didn’t perceive the l ~ r contrast, Mandarin speakers did, although none of the languages has an l ~ r contrast.

However, Mandarin does have other segments which differ in [+coronal] ([r]), so Mandarin speakers do need to distinguish [±coronal] elsewhere.

Phonological features, filtering

Han (1992). Japanese distinguishes geminate from non-geminate stops (consonant length; k vs. kk, e.g., black owl vs. black cat). English doesn’t (*kkat vs. kat).