Juana Muñoz-Liceras- PhD Applied Linguistics
- Professor at University of Ottawa
Juana Muñoz-Liceras
- PhD Applied Linguistics
- Professor at University of Ottawa
Professor of General and Hispanic Linguistics
Director Language Acquisition Research Laboratory-UOttawa
About
100
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Introduction
Juana M. Liceras is a Distinguished University Professor and a professor of General and Hispanic linguistics in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures and the Department of Linguistics of the University of Ottawa, as well as a research advisor in the Applied Language Program at the Universidad Nebrija of Madrid (Spain), the Director of the Nebrija-Santander global Chair in Spanish as a Migrant and Refugee Language and the Director of the Language Acquisition Research Laboratory of the University of Ottawa.Her research centers on the relationship between linguistic theory and language acquisition, language contact and psycholinguistics. Her rcent work is dedicated to the cognitive, metalinguistic and linguistic analysis of bilingualism in populations with cognitive disabilities.
Current institution
Publications
Publications (100)
Unlike with the typically developing population, non-typically developing individuals, especially those with intellectual disabilities, have usually been recommended to learn and use only one language, despite perhaps coming from bilingual families or living in multilingual environments. This common practice, however, is not backed by empirical evi...
The research presented in this volume covers first language acquisition, second language acquisition, language heritage and language impairment. Papers in this collection use a variety of experimental methods, such as eye-tracking, elicitation tasks, production tasks administered off-line and untimed, transcriptions of spontaneous speech, productio...
The volume espouses an ecosystemic standpoint on multilingual acquisition and learning, viewing language development and use as both ontogenesis and phylogenesis. Multilingualism is inclusively used to refer to sociolinguistic diversity and pluralism. Whether speech, writing, gesture, or body movement, language is a conduit that carries meaning wit...
Este estudio investiga las habilidades lingüísticas y metalingüísticas de bilingües de castellano y catalán con discapacidad intelectual ligada a síndromes genéticos. A los participantes se les administraron pruebas estandarizadas y una prueba experimental. Respecto a esta última, adoptando el marco cognitivo metalingüístico de Bialystok y colabora...
Codeswitching has been used as a tool to investigate how the properties of the two language systems interact in the bilingual mind with relatively few studies investigating bilingual children. We target two groups of L1-Spanish–L2-English children in Spain to address language activation and language inhibition in the processing of codeswitching bet...
This volume includes fourteen papers on the acquisition of Romance languages, eleven of which were presented at the Romance Turn 9, held in Bucharest in September 2018. The studies offer new insights into central issues in the literature, such as syntactic complexity in both typical and impaired language settings, intervention effects, the acquisit...
Según The Position of Antecedent Hypothesis – PAH, propuesta por Carminati (2002), en las lenguas de sujeto nulo, la selección de antecedente por parte del sujeto nulo o del sujeto explícito de una subordinada difiere en función de la posición estructural que dicho antecedente ocupe en la oración principal. A partir de esta hipótesis, hicimos un es...
Previous studies on the acquisition of semantics in the aspectual domain have suggested that a difficult case for achieving a targetlike representation in a second language arises when learners need to preempt a first language (L1) option (Gabriele, 2009). This study investigates this issue by focusing on a learning scenario where predicate-level v...
In Spanish, inflectional affixes attach to the morphological and semantic head of Noun-Noun (N-N) compounds, which implies that the plural of casa cuna or hombre lobo is casaS cuna and hombreS lobo respectively, while *casa cunaS and *hombre loboS are ungrammatical because the inflectional affix is attached to the modifier. However, there seems to...
We use code-switched structures to investigate how gender is represented in the mind of an adult English-Spanish bilingual (Spanish is the Heritage language) who has Prader-Willi Syndrome (PWS), a genetic disorder that presents both behavioral disturbances and intellectual and linguistic disabilities. The latter remains entirely unexplored in the c...
Even though research on bilingual first language acquisition (2L1) could be conceptualized as monolingual acquisition (L1) of two individual languages, the fact that in 2L1 acquisition there is exposure to input from two languages has consequences in terms of how the two language systems interact in the mind of the bilingual. This century has seen...
Peer review is an essential part in the publication process, and ensures that Languages maintains high quality standards for its published papers [...]
Inflectional affixes only adhere to the head of Noun-Noun (NN) compounds which implies that the plural of casa cuna (‘crib house’) or hombre lobo (‘werewolf’) is casa- s cuna (‘crib houses’) and hombre- s lobo (‘werewolves’) respectively, while *casa cuna- s and *hombre lobo- s ‒ with the plural inflectional affix on the modifier ‒ are ungrammatica...
This study examines bilinguals’ gender use strategies in code-switched agreement (i.e. the moon is bonita) and concord (i.e. la moon) structures. Thirty-five L1 Spanish-L2 English adult bilinguals and 43 L1 English-L2 Spanish adults with an intermediate (N=18) or advanced (N=25) level of proficiency in Spanish completed an acceptability judgment ta...
Taking as a point of departure the premise that non-native grammars are I-Languages in the Chomskian sense, we approach them from a linguistic, a psycholinguistic, a contact linguistics and a pedagogical perspective in order to argue that a refined version of the Interlanguage Hypothesis (Selinker 1972) - and its most immediate successor, the Funda...
This volume provides a sample of the most recent studies on Spanish-English codeswitching both in the Caribbean and among bilinguals in the United States. In thirteen chapters, it brings together the work of leading scholars representing diverse disciplinary perspectives within linguistics, including psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, theoretical...
In bilingual child language acquisition research, a recurrent learnabil-ity issue has been to investigate whether and how cross-linguistic influence would interact with the non-adult patterns of omission/production of functional categories. In this paper, we analyze the omission/production of subject pronouns in the earliest stage English grammar a...
The articles compiled in this volume provide an account of current research in “core” areas in the field of language acquisition (primary, secondary and bilingual) and suggest new avenues of research and ways of approaching the relationship between the theories and methodologies. Within the framework of cognitive sciences, specifically linguistics...
Previous code-switching literature argues that no switch takes place between a pronoun and a verb, while Determiner Phrases (DPs) do code-switch. This paper uses code-switching acceptability judgment data elicited from three groups of English-Spanish bilinguals (2L1 children, L2 English children and L2 English adults) to test: (i) van Gelderen & Ma...
In this paper we focus on the relationship between Spanish compounding and derivation on the one hand, and anaphoric relations involving null and overt subjects, on the other, in order to argue that a pedagogical grammar of Spanish for non-native speakers should take into consideration: (i) universal approaches to the analysis of Spanish which also...
Attempts to provide representational accounts of L2 optionality are always welcome because they provide us with tools to determine whether and to what extent non-native grammars are idiosyncratic. In their keynote article, Amaral & Roeper have also devised a specific way of accounting for how an L2 (or an L3 or an Ln grammar) is added to the initia...
The presence of non-adult patterns of omission/production of functional categories has occupied a central place in both monolingual and bilingual child language acquisition research. In bilingual acquisition a central learnability issue has been to determine whether interlinguistic influence would interact with those patterns. In this article, the...
The present study takes as a point of departure Becker's analysis of the copula be in English monolingual data and focuses on the distribution of copula be in the data from two English/Spanish bilingual children. Our data analysis shows that, as in Becker's study, the distribution of copula omission in the bilingual data is determined by the nature...
Syntactic theory has played a role in second language acquisition (SLA) research since the early 1980s, when the principles and parameters model of generative grammar was implemented. However, it was the so-called functional parameterization hypothesis together with the debate on whether second language learners activated new features or switched t...
Ratings were collected from 102 native speakers of Spanish on the subjective frequency of occurrence of 330 Spanish words, including 120 deverbal compounds and their constituents. These ratings were found to be highly reliable, whether items were analyzed together or separately by type (i.e., compounds, nouns, verbs), as evidenced by indexes of int...
In this article we study the acquisition of sentential negation in English by bilingual (Spanish/Basque) learners in an institutional setting. The learners were divided into three groups according to the age at which they had begun to learn English (four, eight and eleven years respectively). At the time the oral interviews were held, they had all...
The novelty of Lardiere's proposal does not reside in her so-called `rehabilitation' of Contrastive Analysis. In generative second language acquisition research, appeal to the best available analyses and descriptions of the languages under investigation has always been a top priority, whether the focus was parameters, functional categories or featu...
This article discusses the issue of Cartografía para un balance del español como interlengua of Jorge J. Sánchez Iglesias. It provides a well-founded analysis of the expression �acquisicional linguistic� and gives copious information about corpus that can be used for interlanguage analysis and studies. El presente artículo comenta la edición de Car...
In this paper we analyze spontaneous and experimental data involving code-mixed DPs made up of English Determiners + Spanish Nouns (the casa “house”) and Spanish Determiners + English Nouns (la [the/feminine] house) from child English/Spanish simultaneous bilinguals and from L1 speakers of English, French and Spanish with different levels of profic...
One of the aspects of child language that has attired the attention of numerous
researchers concerns the production of non-finite forms in contexts where a finite
form would be required, i.e., what have come to be known as root infinitives (RIs).
Depending on the language, these non-finite forms may be actual infinitives (as in
French, German or Du...
It is important that there be different approaches to Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research, some of which will be contrasting and some complementary. In the former case, the contrast may lead to a review of assumptions which will result in mutual or unilateral enrichment. In the latter case, it is obvious that we are to aim at achieving a com...
Lo que me propongo hacer en este trabajo es tratar de mostrar, de forma muy escueta, claro está, cómo y por qué existen diferencias fundamentales entre la adquisición de la lengua materna y la de las lenguas segundas, lo cual implica que en la enseñanza de las lenguas segundas se deben tener en cuenta esas diferencias con objeto de facilitar el pro...
One of the aspects of child language that has attired the attention of numerous researchers concerns the production of non-finite forms in contexts where a finite form would be required, i.e., what have come to be known as root infinitives (RIs). Depending on the language, these non-finite forms may be actual infinitives (as in French, German or Du...
We analyzed some earlier studies of English L1 and L2 morpheme orders, basing our analysis on current functional categories theory. Our analysis meets two long-standing charges against morpheme order data; namely, that the heterogeneity of the morphemes does not yield up any insights into L2 acquisition and that the English language-based orders la...
This study investigates the status of subject pronouns in the English interlanguage of Basque-Spanish bilinguals from a minimalist perspective. The oral production of 20 participants was analyzed at two different points in their acquisition of English (Time 1:396 hours of exposure; Time 2:564 hours of exposure). The pronoun he, systematicaily adjoi...
In this paper we adopt Hyams’ (2001) proposal that RIs in child language fall out of the attempt to establish a realis/irrealis opposition. More specifically, we argue that the Root Infinitive stage or, in other words, the way in which children mark the realis/irrealis opposition, is manifested across languages depending on the (un)availability of...
In this volume, second language (L2) acquisition researchers and creolists engage in a dialogue, focusing on processes at work in L2 acquisition and creole genesis. The volume opens with an overview of the relationship between L2 acquisition and pidgins/creoles (Siegel). The first group of papers addresses current language contact at a societal or...
In this article we provide an explanation for 2 syntactic phenomena whose systematic production has been observed in the English nonnative grammar of 3 different age groups of 58 bilingual (Basque/Spanish) children after 4 years of exposure to English in a formal setting: (a) insertion of is before a lexical verb and (b) insertion of a subject pers...
We have argued that the grammatical features spell-out hypothesis (GFSH) (Liceras, Spradlin, Perales, Fernández, & Álvarez, 2003; Spradlin, Liceras & Fernández, 2003a) accounts for the functional-lexical mixing patterns that prevail in the case of Determiner Phrases produced by bilingual (English-Spanish) children. This hypothesis (Liceras, 2002; S...
Liceras, J. M. 2005. La adquisición de la lengua materna y las lenguas segundas: ¿Qué caminos llevan a qué Roma? (pp. 119-151). In P. Fuertes Olivera, (ed.). Lengua y Sociedad: Investigaciones Recientes en Lingüística Aplicada. Valladolid: Servicio de Publicaciones, Universidad de Valladolid.
ABSTRACT
Partiendo del supuesto de que tanto los niños...
La teoría lingüística chomskiana y en concreto su versión más reciente, el llamado Programa Minimalista, nos proporciona constructos teóricos que permiten abordar no sólo el llamado problema de la aprendibilidad del lenguaje (es decir dar cuenta de cómo, pese a la fragmentación e indeterminación de los datos, el niño es capaz de crear una gramática...
The controversy over the so-called 'Fundamental Difference Hypothesis' (FDH) as the main opponent to the 'Full Access Hypothesis' (FAH) (e. g. Epstein, Flynn and Martohardjono 1996) has been a fact of life for researchers in the field of L2 acquisition for the last two decades. The more momentum this controversy gained, the more it has brought us m...
Research on L 1, L2 and L1 bilingual acquisition of compounding has aimed at determining the underlying knowledge which leads learners to produce compounds (Alegre and Gordon 1996; Clark and Berman 1987; Clark, 1998; Nicoladis 1999; Liceras and Díaz 2000) and has addressed issues such as Kiparsky’s (1985) morphological level ordering constraint (Go...
Recent developments in linguistic theory, as well as the growing body of evidence from languages other than English, provide new opportunities for deeper explorations into how language is represented in the mind of learners. This collection of new empirical studies on the acquisition of Spanish morphosyntax by leading researchers in the field of la...
abstractos que no tienen una relación directa —aunque sí indirecta— con el léxico o la morfología explícita, sí que hay un interés creciente por la búsqueda de ‘elementos’. De hecho, en la propuesta chomskiana más reciente, la que se conoce como el Programa Minimalista (Chomsky, 1995), los rasgos de las categorías gramaticales son los ‘elementos’ r...
Spanish has left-headed compounds which are not as productive as their left-headed counterparts in other languages. This presence or absence of productivity has been attributed to a binary parameter according to which N-N compounding, as opposed to nominal constructions in which the head noun takes a complement as in "the destruction of the city¿,...
In order to investigate whether the acquisition of N-drop (null nouns) is related to the acquisition of the agreement system of Spanish determiners this paper analyzes L1 longitudinal Spanish data from two children and L2 longitudinal data from two children learning Spanish in a naturalistic setting. Based on the results, it is argued that in L1, t...
In recent research on primary (L1) and non-primary (L2) acquisition,special attention has been given to whether syntactic development is subject to a continuity condition. While it has been proposed that the continuity condition applies to both L1 and L2 syntactic growth,the changes that take place in developing grammars have sometimes been attribu...
Recent developments within the so-called Principles and Parameters model of acquisition argue for a clear-cut separation of Universal Grammar (UG) principles from parametric options and locate all parameters within functional categories (Borer, 1984; Lebeaux, 1988; Chomsky, 1991). This has led Tsimpli and Roussou (1991) to propose that adult L2 (se...
Los problemas que vamos a tratar en este trabajo, si bien muy próximos al espíritu cornparatista que ha inspirado tradicionalmente los trabajos de lingtiística románica, pueden verse como un tanto ajenos a los intereses de muchos roma-nistas. Sin embargo, nuestro colega Pedro Peira, a quien está dedicado este volumen, quería incorporar esta temátic...
L2 learners may access UG principles because these are realized in all natural languages. Since this is not the case for the parametrized aspects of language, parameter setting may be progressively replaced by restructuring mechanisms which are specifically related to the process of representational redescription because L2 learners are not sensiti...
Null subjects are present in the Spanish interlanguage of adolescents and adult learners from the very first stages of their instructed second language learning. This is so for matrix and subordinate sentences, and for initial and advanced stages of interlanguage development. Distributional patterns found in L2 and bilingual learners differ from L1...
This volume explores how a second language is acquired and what learners must do in order to achieve proficiency. The paperback edition is a collection of original essays that approaches second language acquisition from a linguistic rather than a sociological, psychological, or purely pedagogical perspective. A wide range of viewpoints and approach...
This paper focuses on questions related to issues of learnability in second language acquisition. Specifically, in this paper I attempt to clarify the relationship between a theory of grammar and the mechanisms that are responsible for the development of second language (L2) competence. Within that relationship, the specific though very general mec...
One of the tasks of second language acquisition research is to determine the ‘linguistic’ nature of interlanguage systems. To achieve this goal it is mandatory to formulate the properties of learners' grammars in terms of the theoretical constructs proposed by linguistic theory. I have proposed elsewhere (Liceras, 1985) that, permeability, one of t...
Spanish has left-headed compounds which are not as productive as their left-headed counterparts in other languages. This presence or absence of productivity has been attributed to a binary parameter according to which N-N compounding, as opposed to nominal constructions in which the head noun takes a complement as in "the destruction of the city",...
realization associated with abstract tense and agreement. Spontaneous production data from an adult Chinese learner of English named ,Patty whose ,English was at end-state level showed ,that although emergence,of tense marking,and 3, person,singular agreement,morphology,was low (35% and 17% respectively), perfect nominative case assignment was obse...
Tras revisar los distintos enfoques con que se ha abordado el concepto de permeabilidad en la literatura relacionada con la teoría de la adquisición de la lengua, el autor argumenta que la permeabilidad es una propiedad de las gramáticas nativas y no nativas que está determinada por la relación que existe entre las capacidades cognoscitivas lingüís...
En: Cognitiva Madrid 2003, v. 15, n. 2 ; p. 151-160 La teoría lingüística chomskiana y en concreto su versión más reciente, el llamado Programa Minimista, proporcionan constructos teóricos que permiten abordar no sólo el llamado problema de la aprendibilidad del lenguaje (es decir dar cuenta de cómo, pese a la fragmentación e indeterminación de los...
