Eurosla YearbookPub Date : 1900-01-01DOI: 10.1075/EUROSLA.8.13SHI
Mayumi Shibuya, Shigenori Wakabayashi
{"title":"Why are L2 learners not always sensitive to subject-verb agreement?","authors":"Mayumi Shibuya, Shigenori Wakabayashi","doi":"10.1075/EUROSLA.8.13SHI","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/EUROSLA.8.13SHI","url":null,"abstract":"This study investigates whether intermediate Japanese learners of English (JLE) show any variability in sensitivity to the overuse of 3rd person singular (3sg) -s and if they do, what the causes may be. The results of the experiment indicate that JLE do exhibit variability: JLE showed sensitivity to ungrammaticality caused by a discrepancy in person features between subjects and verbs. In addition, they were sensitive to number feature disagreement when the plurality of subjects was expressed syntactically, namely, by using the conjunction and (e.g., Tim and Paul), by the demonstrative these and by a numeral quantifier (e.g., these two secretaries). However, they were not sensitive to such disagreement when subjects were marked only by plural -s (e.g., The chefs). Based on these results, we suggest that the failure of JLE to use 3sg -s may not lie in the difficulty of subject–verb agreement, but in the detection of the number feature of sentential subjects. We suggest that intermediate JLE have problems both with the number feature at the lexicon/syntax level and with its morphological mapping at the level of morphology.","PeriodicalId":236084,"journal":{"name":"Eurosla Yearbook","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115412792","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Eurosla YearbookPub Date : 1900-01-01DOI: 10.1075/EUROSLA.1.12FRA
Florencia Franceschina
{"title":"Against an L2 morphological deficit as an explanation for the differences between native and non-native grammars","authors":"Florencia Franceschina","doi":"10.1075/EUROSLA.1.12FRA","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/EUROSLA.1.12FRA","url":null,"abstract":"One proposed explanation for the observed differences between native and non-native speakers has been that certain peripheral systems interacting with the computational system are defective in L2 acquisition. This paper will consider some of the predictions that follow from assuming that the morphological module which interacts with the computational system (or their interface) is defective. If this basic assumption is correct, we should expect all learners to be able to acquire the L2 grammar equally well, and where mistakes are found they should be due to problems in the morphology. The results of an empirical study of the acquisition of grammatical gender in advanced English and Italian speakers of L2 Spanish do not support these predictions, as the errors found appear to be syntactic in nature.","PeriodicalId":236084,"journal":{"name":"Eurosla Yearbook","volume":"267 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122468075","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Eurosla YearbookPub Date : 1900-01-01DOI: 10.1075/EUROSLA.8.09IVE
Michael Iverson, P. Kempchinsky, J. Rothman
{"title":"Interface vulnerability and knowledge of the subjunctive/indicative distinction with negated epistemic predicates in L2 Spanish","authors":"Michael Iverson, P. Kempchinsky, J. Rothman","doi":"10.1075/EUROSLA.8.09IVE","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/EUROSLA.8.09IVE","url":null,"abstract":"Much recent research in SLA is guided by the hypothesis of L2 interface vulnerability (see Sorace 2005). This study contributes to this general project by examining the acquisition of two classes of subjunctive complement clauses in L2 Spanish: subjunctive complements of volitional predicates (purely syntactic) and subjunctive vs. indicative complements with negated epistemic matrix predicates, where the mood distinction is discourse dependent (thus involving the syntax–discourse interface). We provide an analysis of the volitional subjunctive in English and Spanish, suggesting that English learners of L2 Spanish need to access the functional projection Mood P and an uninterpretable modal feature on the Force head available to them from their formal English register grammar, and simultaneously must unacquire the structure of English for-to clauses. For negated epistemic predicates, our analysis maintains that they need to revalue the modal feature on the Force head from uninterpretable to interpretable, within the L2 grammar.With others (e.g. Borgonovo & Prevost 2003; Borgonovo, Bruhn de Garavito & Prevost 2005) and in line with Sorace’s (2000, 2003, 2005) notion of interface vulnerability, we maintain that the latter case is more difficult for L2 learners, which is borne out in the data we present. However, the data also show that the indicative/subjunctive distinction with negated epistemics can be acquired by advanced stages of acquisition, questioning the notion of obligatory residual optionality for all properties which require the integration of syntactic and discourse information.","PeriodicalId":236084,"journal":{"name":"Eurosla Yearbook","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129926348","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Eurosla YearbookPub Date : 1900-01-01DOI: 10.1075/EUROSLA.4.09BAR
K. Bardovi-Harlig
{"title":"Monopolizing the future: How the go-future breaks into will's territory and what it tells us about SLA","authors":"K. Bardovi-Harlig","doi":"10.1075/EUROSLA.4.09BAR","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/EUROSLA.4.09BAR","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":236084,"journal":{"name":"Eurosla Yearbook","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128533475","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Eurosla YearbookPub Date : 1900-01-01DOI: 10.1075/EUROSLA.5.05AYO
Dalila Ayoun
{"title":"Verb movement in the L2 acquisition of English by adult native speakers of French","authors":"Dalila Ayoun","doi":"10.1075/EUROSLA.5.05AYO","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/EUROSLA.5.05AYO","url":null,"abstract":"This study investigates the acquisition of English verb movement phenomena by two groups of adult French native speakers: a group of secondary school students and a group of university students. A group of English native speakers served as controls. Participants were administered a written questionnaire composed of a controlled production task, a grammaticality judgment task, and a preference/grammaticality judgment task, to test acquisition of the syntactic properties associated with the verb movement parameter (Pollock 1989, 1997). Instead of substantiating the anecdotal evidence that suggests that adverb placement errors persist into very advanced stages of English L2 acquisition, the present data support the successful acquisition of English adverb placement by French native speakers. It is argued that the advanced group has acquired the appropriate L2 parametric value as measured by the controlled production task; while results on the other two tasks are explained by performance effects.","PeriodicalId":236084,"journal":{"name":"Eurosla Yearbook","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128625287","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Eurosla YearbookPub Date : 1900-01-01DOI: 10.1075/EUROSLA.13.04PRE
Alexandra Prentza, I. Tsimpli
{"title":"On the optionality in L2 pronominal production and interpretation: What (more) can VP-coordination structures tell us?","authors":"Alexandra Prentza, I. Tsimpli","doi":"10.1075/EUROSLA.13.04PRE","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/EUROSLA.13.04PRE","url":null,"abstract":"This paper aims to contribute to the discussion pertaining to the source of optionality in second language (L2) pronominal interpretation. We examined pronominal use not only in L2 English adverbial – adjunct CP clauses (‘The student was upset because he had failed the test’), but also in English VP-coordination structures (‘Jane had studied hard and (she) passed the exam’), an area which has never been investigated before. While English adjunct CP clauses represent a context in which overt pronominal subjects are obligatory, in VP-coordination pronouns can be apparently dropped. These structures were tested by means of two English production tasks: a Sentence Completion task and a Cloze Test. Our results showed that compared to the English controls the Greek learners used (a) significantly more ungrammatical null subjects in adjunct CP clauses and, crucially, (b) significantly more overt pronominal subjects in VP-coordination structures. After examining two possible accounts for the observed optionality, namely, the Interface Hypothesis and the Interpretability Hypothesis, we argue that a language internal syntax explanation best addresses our data both in the adjunct CP clauses and in the VP-coordination structures.","PeriodicalId":236084,"journal":{"name":"Eurosla Yearbook","volume":"76 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130155917","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Eurosla YearbookPub Date : 1900-01-01DOI: 10.1075/EUROSLA.1.19KUS
M. Kusiak
{"title":"The effect of metacognitive strategy training on reading comprehension and metacognitive knowledge","authors":"M. Kusiak","doi":"10.1075/EUROSLA.1.19KUS","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/EUROSLA.1.19KUS","url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses the results of research investigating the effect of metacognitive strategy training on the reading comprehension and metacognitive knowledge of Polish intermediate learners of English as a foreign language. Results of a pretest and posttest questionnaire and a reading comprehension test administered to both an experimental and a control group of students suggest that students who were taught to apply self-regulatory strategies while performing a task related to reading could enhance their metacognitive knowledge of themselves as readers, their perceptions of the reading process and reading strategies, and their motivation as well as self-evaluation of reading skills. With respect to the students’ reading comprehension, a comparison of the effect of the training on students at two levels of language competence indicates that the training was more effective for the less proficient students. The study points to the effectiveness of metacognitive strategy training for students at an intermediate level of language proficiency. It also stresses the significance of learners’ beliefs concerning reading and underscores the role of metacognition in developing reading skills.","PeriodicalId":236084,"journal":{"name":"Eurosla Yearbook","volume":"44 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116505030","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Eurosla YearbookPub Date : 1900-01-01DOI: 10.1075/EUROSLA.13.03PAT
M. Patkowski
{"title":"The critical period and parameter setting in five cases of delayed L1 acquisition","authors":"M. Patkowski","doi":"10.1075/EUROSLA.13.03PAT","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/EUROSLA.13.03PAT","url":null,"abstract":"Three well-known cases of extreme linguistic isolation during childhood and two recent cases from the neurological literature involving left-hemispherectomy in children are examined. In all five situations, subjects underwent delayed L1 acquisition (with L1 onset ranging from 5 to 31 years). “End-state” utterances provided in published reports are analyzed for evidence concerning subjects’ control of the Head Position, Null Subject, and Wh parameters. In addition, the early phrasal development of a subset of the five subjects is investigated in terms of the asymmetric Merge operation. Findings concerning ultimate attainment indicate that the younger cases set parameters more successfully, and that performance declines markedly with increasing age, while results regarding early multiword utterances suggest that these are strikingly “normal” as long as delayed onset of L1 occurs within, and right up to, the critical period boundary. This pattern, it is argued, is consistent with the notion that pre- and post-critical period first language learning involve qualitatively different processes.","PeriodicalId":236084,"journal":{"name":"Eurosla Yearbook","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128085538","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Eurosla YearbookPub Date : 1900-01-01DOI: 10.1075/EUROSLA.7.09GOB
P. Gobel, S. Mori
{"title":"Success and failure in the EFL classroom: Exploring students’ attributional beliefs in language learning","authors":"P. Gobel, S. Mori","doi":"10.1075/EUROSLA.7.09GOB","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/EUROSLA.7.09GOB","url":null,"abstract":"This paper describes a study into learners’ attributions for success and failure in learning English as a foreign language. The study investigated perceived reasons for successes and failures on actual language learning tasks in both oral communication and reading classes, looking at how learners judge their successes and failures, and their range of attributions. A questionnaire was created based on attribution theory focusing on the attributions of ability, effort, task difficulty, and luck and was administered to 233 Japanese first-year university students. A significant relationship between exam scores and the attributions of ability, task difficulty and likes was found, with attributions for failure focusing on internal causes and attributions for success on external causes. The theoretical structure of causal attributions is discussed, and the implications that can be drawn with regard to cultural bias, language teaching and the nature of the learning environment are considered.","PeriodicalId":236084,"journal":{"name":"Eurosla Yearbook","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134129159","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}