Stefanie Wulff

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at University of Florida

Upon hearing someone’s speech, a listener can access information such as the speaker’s age, gender identity, socioeconomic status, and their linguistic background. However, an open question is whether living in different locales modulates how listeners use these factors to assess speakers’ speech. Here, an audio-visual test was used to measure whet...

Herein, we contextualize, problematize, and offer some insights for moving beyond the problem of monolingual comparative normativity in (psycho) linguistic research on bilin-gualism. We argue that, in the vast majority of cases, juxtaposing (functional) monolin-guals to bilinguals fails to offer what the comparison is supposedly intended to do: mee...

The growing interdisciplinary research field of psycholinguistics is in constant need of new and up-to-date tools which will allow researchers to answer complex questions, but also expand on languages other than English, which dominates the field. One type of such tools are picture datasets which provide naming norms for everyday objects. However,...

Standard varieties are often perceived as morally superior compared with nonstandard varieties (Hill 2008). Consequently, these differences lead to ideologies that racialize nonstandard varieties (Rosa 2016), and increase the negative stereotypes towards nonstandard varieties (Giles and Watson 2013). One outlet of such stereotypes can be observed w...

This study examines the variable positioning of a finite adverbial subordinate clause and its main clause with the subordinate clause either preceding or following the main clause in native versus nonnative English. Specifically, we contrast causal, concessive, conditional, and temporal adverbial clauses produced by German and Chinese learners of E...

No PDF available ABSTRACT Research shows that listeners' perceived accentedness can be mediated by visual input (Babel & Russell, 2015; McGowan, 2015; Zheng & Samuel, 2017), and can change depending on their exposure to varied speech (Baese-Berk et al., 2013). Here, we tested the impact that visual input and linguistic diversity has on listeners' p...

Upon hearing someone’s speech, a listener can make inferences regarding the speakers’ age, gender identity, socioeconomic status, and their linguistic background. However, it is not clear to what extent listeners use these factors to decode the speech signal itself. Here, we use an audio-visual task to measure whether listeners’ accentedness and in...

https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/139790/1/ProofsEllisandWulff.pdf

Cambridge Core - Applied Linguistics - The Cambridge Handbook of Language Learning - edited by John W. Schwieter

The Cambridge Handbook of Language Learning - edited by John W. Schwieter June 2019

Advances in Learner Corpus Research (LCR) and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) have brought these two fast-moving fields significantly closer in recent years. This volume brings together contributions from internationally recognized experts in both LCR and SLA to provide an innovative, cross-collaborative examination of how both areas can provide...

This study presents the first multifactorial corpus-based analysis of verb particle constructions in a data sample comprising spoken and written productions by intermediate-level learners of English as a second language from 17 first language backgrounds. 4911 attestations retrieved from native speaker and language learner corpora were annotated fo...

We investigate the cross-linguistic influence and the (longitudinal) impact of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) on the acquisition of intensifying constructions, using corpora of written French, Dutch, and English productions by L1 speakers, and L2 English and L2 Dutch produced by French-speaking learners in CLIL and traditional fore...

We present an overview of the cognitive underpinnings of usage-based approaches to second language acquisition (L2A). Not all constructions are equally learnable, even after years of (frequent) exposure. We present a usage-based analysis of this phenomenon in terms of fundamental principles of associative learning: Low salience, low contingency, an...

Technical and scientific writing service courses offer instructors the opportunity to engage with student populations from across the university. However, it is also this interdisciplinary appeal that has complicated the quality of instruction, particularly for STEM majors. The heterogeneous student population in our service courses often results i...

This volume brings together empirical Construction Grammar studies to (i) promote cross-fertilization between researchers interested in constructional approaches on various languages, and (ii) further the growing trend towards empirically rigorous research that takes seriously a commitment not only to usage-based theories, but also to usage-based m...

This Special Collection includes a number of articles published together on the topic of Psycholinguistics and Variation and identified by the keyword “PsychLingVar” The collection reflects our view that variation in language processing is both important and ubiquitous, and that such variation presents challenges that psycholinguists have long igno...

Corpus linguists are increasingly interested in applying their methodological tool box to the various areas of multilingualism. This paper gives an overview of corpus resources and presents three case studies on L2 foreign language learning that employ quantitative methods. The goal is to demonstrate that corpus-linguistic approaches further our un...

This study presents a contrastive analysis of 3624 instances of prenominal adjective order retrieved from the Chinese and German sections of the International Corpus of Learner English and the International Corpus of English . The data was annotated for nine determinants of adjective order, including semantic, frequency-related, and articulatory fe...

Just how proficient are second language learners in using formulaic language? Do formulaic phrases play a role in second language acquisition (SLA)? These are the two questions to be addressed here using evidence from learner corpus research. Whilst Krashen and Scarcella (1978) argued that formulaic language was outside the creative language proces...

In certain English finite complement clauses, inclusion of the complementizer that is optional. Previous research has identified various factors that influence when native speakers tend to produce or omit the complementizer, including syntactic weight, clause juncture constraints, and predicate frequency. The present study addresses the question to...

The decision to follow the demonstrative This with a noun phrase is important to students’ writing development. Previous research has emphasized when students should not attend This rather than studying why students make the choice. Using a corpus-linguistic approach, we investigated 1,999 instances of (un)attended This in student technical and aca...

This paper exemplifies an approach to learner corpus data that adopts a multifactorial definition of ‘context’. We apply a logistic regression to 2,986 attestations of genitive alternation (the squirrel’s nest vs. the nest of the squirrel) from the Chinese and German sub-sections of the International Corpus of Learner English and the British compon...

Seventy-eight native English speakers rated the foreign-accented speech (FAS) of 24 international students enrolled in an Intensive English programme at a public university in Texas on degree of accent, comprehensibility and communicative ability. Variables considered to potentially impact listeners' ratings were the sex of the speaker, the first l...

This study presents a contrastive analysis of gerundial and infinitival complementation produced by Spanish and German ESL learners and English native speakers. An analysis of more than 1,100 attestations of the target constructions obtained from the International Corpus of Learner English reveals that (i) advanced learners' construction choices ar...

This paper addresses the question of what governs the optional attendance of the determiner this by a noun phrase in academic student writing. Previous research on this has largely focused on the noun phrases accompanying this, while the question of what determines writers choice between attended and unattended this in the first place has received...

This paper provides an overview of how to compute simple binary logistic regressions and linear regressions with the open source programming language R on the basis of the INTERSECT corpus of English texts and their French and German translations. First, we show how one of the key statistics of logistic regressions is conceptually similar to the ch...

Adopting the perspective of Ellis's (2007) Associative-Cognitive CREED, this chapter proposes a measure of accuracy in learner production that is based on conditional probabilities. More specifically, we develop a definition of accuracy as the proficient selection of constructions in their preferred constructional context in a particular target gen...

Chunks für DAF (‘Chunks for Learning German as a Second Language’) presents the prototype of a multimedia self-study program for second language learners of German. The target construction in the prototype are German participial constructions, which are difficult to acquire because of their complex lexico-syntactic behavior. Largely driven by a con...

Based on explorations of the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP), the present paper provides an introduction to the central techniques in corpus analysis, including the creation and examination of word lists, keyword lists, concordances, and cluster lists. It also presents a MICUSP-based case study of the demonstrative pronoun th...

This paper presents a corpus-linguistic compositionality measure for V NP­ Constructions (make a point, take the plunge) that implements fundamental as­ sumptions of Construction Grammar: -the semantic contributions made by all component words to the constructional meaning are quantified; -the component words' semantic contributions to the construc...

Recent corpus studies have shown that learners of English are aware of systematic associations between verbs and their preferred argument structures to an extent that is similar to that of a native speaker of English (e.g., Gries and Wulff, 2005 ). Given evidence for similarly systematic associations in native speaker data at the lexis–morphology i...

In Construction Grammar, highly frequent syntactic configurations are assumed to be stored as symbolic units in the mental lexicon alongside words. Considering the example of gerund and infinitival complement constructions in English (She tried rocking the baby vs. She tried to rock the baby), this study combines corpus-linguistic and experimental...

The aspect hypothesis (Andersen & Shirai, 1994) proposes that language learners are initially influenced by the inherent semantic aspect in the acquisition of tense and aspect (TA) morphology. Perfective past emerges earlier with accomplishments and achievements and progressive with activities. Although this hypothesis has been extensively studied,...

It is a by now established fact that idiomaticity cannot be equated with non-compositionality alone, but is a complex concept that is also associated with various aspects of formal flexibility. This raises the question to what extent speakers call up these different factors when judging the overall idiomaticity of a phrase. In the present paper, ex...

This paper discusses the John Swales Conference Corpus (JSCC), which contains the lectures and discussion sessions from an applied linguistics conference held in 2006 at the University of Michigan. This corpus constitutes a useful resource in that it provides insights into the language of a narrowly defined academic community. Moreover, it spans th...

Meaning does not reside in linguistic units but is constructed in the minds of the language users. Meaning construction is an on-line mental activity whereby speech participants create meanings on the basis of underspecified linguistic units. The construction of meaning is guided by cognitive principles. The contributions collected in the volume fo...

The present paper deals with the double verb patterns go-and-V and go-V. While generative approaches have argued that the latter are truncated surface forms de- rived from the former, the present paper adds to the empirical evidence obtained so far, arguing in favor of the view that the two patterns be adequately conceived of as separate constructi...

In Construction Grammar, the ultimate grammatical unit is the construction, a conventionalized form-meaning pairing. We present interrelated evidence from three different methods, all of which speak in favor of attributing an ontological status to constructions for non-native speakers of English. Firstly, in a sentence-fragment completion study wit...

Recent publications in the field of corpus linguistics (including several in this and the previous issue of CLLT) strongly indicate that the field is on its way from a view of corpora as mere repositories of authentic data from which examples can be culled ad libitum to a methodology that analyzes linguistic phenomena systematically and exhaustivel...

This paper is concerned with the question of which factors govern prenominal adjective order (AO) in English. In particular, the analysis aims to overcome shortfalls of previous analyses by, firstly, adopting a multifactorial approach integrating all variables postulated in the literature, thereby doing justice to the well‐established fact that cog...