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Assessing Verb-Construction Integration in Young Learners of English as a Foreign Language: Analyses of Written and Spoken Production
Abstract
Extending previous findings on adult L2 learners' integration of verbal and constructional information, this study investigated how child learners of English as a foreign language produce verbs in target constructions and whether (a) receptive skills and (b) the specific production modality (spoken versus written) modulate the integration process. Written and spoken samples from 76 Korean-speaking children were analyzed for verb-construction association strength using three independent measures. A mixed-effects regression analysis showed that the written data contained fewer strongly associated verb-construction combinations than did the spoken data, yet verb-construction association in writing became stronger as the participants' receptive task scores increased. Subsequent cluster analyses revealed that the stronger verb-construction associations found for increasing receptive skills in writing were due to the lower-proficiency participants' matching some verbs with inappropriate constructions. The modulating role of production modes, as well as receptive skills, in children's integration of verbs and constructions is consistent with usage-based approaches to language learning.
... Other studies at the word level examined vocabulary use. For example, Kim and Hwang (2022) found that high-proficiency young EFL learners tended to use complex verb patterns (e.g., "Mary faxed John a letter") more frequently in their writing. Low-achieving learners, however, simply used verbs with limited knowledge of these complex patterns (e.g., "The boy is a student"). ...
Writing proficiency is one of the most important skills in second/foreign language (L2/FL) learning. A competent writer is expected to possess linguistic, discourse and sociolinguistic knowledge, and (metacognitive) strategic competence (Yoon & Burton, 2020). Hulstijn (2011, p. 242) also defines writing proficiency as “the extent to which an individual possesses the linguistic cognition necessary to function in a given communicative situation” in writing. It contains (1) basic language cognition (BLC, writers’ lexical and syntactic repertoires, as well as the availability of these lexical units and syntactic structures in the form of more or less ready-made procedures) and (2) higher language cognition (HLC) comprising less frequent lexical and grammatical units such as academic English. Whilst all adult first-language (L1) writers fully equip themselves with BLC but their HLC levels vary, L2 learners may perform better than L1 speakers in HLC whereas they have various degrees of BLC (Hulstijn, 2011). The differences between L1 and L2 writers have attracted scholars’ attention to investigate L2 learners’ writing proficiency development.
Research on developing L2/FL writing proficiency has been largely devoted to the writing of adults and adolescents learning English as a foreign language (EFL) (Cheng & Tsang, 2022), while little attention has been paid to young learners. In light of the cognitive and affective differences between young and adult learners, scholars call for more empirical studies that describe the characteristics of writing produced by
young FL learners (Bae & Bachman, 2010). Against this backdrop, this mixed-methods study investigated vocabulary and textual features of writing produced by low- and high-proficiency Hong Kong young EFL learners. The overarching research question was: How does higher-proficiency young EFL learners’ writing differ from that produced by lower-proficiency learners? We focused on differences at the word,
clausal and text levels.
... ch has often yielded somewhat inconsistent results across previous studies (for further discussion, see Crossley, 2020;Ortega, 2003). Regarding the analysis of speech data, we employed an utterance as the basic unit of analysis, which represents a speech act conveying a single idea in the spoken data (e.g., Georgila et al., 2009;Hwang et al., 2020;H. Kim & Hwang, 2022). In the context of formal spoken data in Korean, this unit primarily corresponds to a sentence, with clear indicators provided by sentence enders, such as -yo (politeness marker) and -ta (declarative marker), thus minimizing the need to rely on prosodic boundaries. ...
Given the lack of computational tools available for assessing second language (L2) production in Korean, this study introduces a novel automated tool called the Korean Syntactic Complexity Analyzer (KOSCA) for measuring syntactic complexity in L2 Korean production. As an open-source graphic user interface (GUI) developed in Python, KOSCA provides seven indices of syntactic complexity, including traditional and Korean-specific ones. Its validity was tested by investigating whether the syntactic complexity indices measured by it in L2 written and spoken production could explain the variability of L2 Korean learners' proficiency. The results of mixed-effects regression analyses showed that all seven indices significantly accounted for learner proficiency in Korean. Subsequent stepwise multiple regression analyses revealed that the syntactic complexity indices explained 56.0% of the total variance in proficiency for the written data and 54.4% for the spoken data. These findings underscore the validity of the syntactic complexity indices measured by KOSCA as reliable indicators of L2 Korean proficiency, which can serve as a valuable resource for researchers and educators in the field of L2 Korean learning and assessment.
... This distribution or skewing consists of a couple of the high-frequency types with a high token number and many low-frequency types with only a few tokens each (see Madlener, 2015: 114 mid_skew). This method has proven useful and efficient in experimental settings to teach a variety of constructions (e.g., Azazil, 2020;Kim & Hwang, 2022). With this, high-frequency types serve the purpose of acting as training wheels, providing the learner with the construction's basic meaning. ...
Second language acquisition studies have mainly considered transfer between two or more languages as a binary setting, it either happens or does not. However, research emerging out of usage-based approaches show that such transfer effects might be more gradient than ever thought before (e.g., Goschler & Stefanowitsch, 2019 ). Investigating a construction that has been reported to pose problems such as overpassivization to L2 English learners, i.e., unaccusatives, this study aims to trace gradient transfer effects between Turkish and English in the intransitive-unaccusative construction in Turkish learners of English. Following Goschler and Stefanowitsch’s (2019) method to analyze, extract experimental items from English and Turkish corpora, and experiment with collostructional transfer effects, the study revealed similar findings. Findings suggest that learners are likely to transfer strongly entrenched L1 items into the L2 even at advanced proficiency levels. Interestingly, when the item is weakly entrenched in L1, speakers attune to the input in L2 with growing proficiency. Furthermore, proficiency or experience helps with preempting non-optimal constructional combinations. Pedagogically, the study suggests that collo-profiles may help teachers and students with mitigating unconventional item-construction combinations at advanced levels.
... Several studies have explored the usage-based learning of constructions in L2 written production, with a primary focus on the verb-construction association-namely, how L2 learners produce verbs in target constructions (e.g. Ellis and Larsen-Freeman 2009;Kyle and Crossley 2017;Kim and Hwang 2022). Yet little is known about how L2 learners expand Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/applij/advance-article/doi/10.1093/applin/amac046/6686677 by Yonsei University user on 02 September 2022 inventories of individual constructions with increased L2 experience. ...
One of the important components in second language (L2) development is to produce clause-level units of form-meaning pairings or argument structure constructions. Based on the usage-based constructionist approach that language development entails an ability to use more diverse, more complex, and less frequent constructions, this study tested whether constructional diversity and complexity predict L2 learners' writing proficiency. Using a natural language processing tool called the Constructional Diversity Analyzer (CDA), we analyzed 3,284 essays produced by college EFL students in terms of the proportion of individual constructions and their diversity. Results from regression analyses showed that constructional diversity reliably predicted learner proficiency: essays with higher scores contained more diverse constructions. We also found that less frequent and more complex constructions made a stronger contribution to predicting the written proficiency levels. Based on the findings, we argue for the validity of constructional diversity and the use of individual constructions as reliable predictors of L2 writing proficiency and propose the application of the CDA for L2 writing assessment and instruction.
Drawing on the SSARC model, TBLT research has investigated the role of task sequencing in L2 production, yielding mixed results. This study conducts a multi-level meta-analysis of methodological practices in task sequencing to provide more transparency. Sixteen studies published up to May 2024 were selected based on inclusion criteria, and each study was coded for analyzed features and contextual variables. Methodological aspects, including study designs, sampling procedures, analyses, and reporting practices, were also coded. Significant methodological variations were identified across studies, including differences in L2 proficiency, learning contexts, task modalities, types, complexities, delivery methods, and constructs. Task complexity emerged as a significant factor influencing L2 performance, with more complex tasks yielding larger effect sizes. Additionally, simple and complex sequencing tasks exhibited a medium effect size in enhancing accuracy, particularly in between-group studies. These findings highlight the importance of balanced learner representation and standardized research practices to improve L2 learning outcomes.
The present study investigated the effects of two usage-related factors-modality (written vs. spoken) and language learning contexts (EFL vs. ESL)-on lexical sophistication in second language (L2) production. We measured 14 features of lexical sophistication in written and spoken texts produced by EFL and ESL learners with matched proficiency. The results showed significant interactions of modality and L2 learning contexts in several indices. In three indices, the EFL learners used more sophisticated words in writing than in speaking. In six indices, the gaps of lexical sophistication scores between writing and speaking were greater for the EFL than the ESL group. The conjoined effects of these factors are argued to stem from disparity in the amount and type of L2 input provided in EFL and ESL contexts.
Although syntactic complexity features both length-based syntactic complexity and syntactic sophistication, previous research has predominantly focused on length-based complexity. Against this background, this study aimed to test the validity of syntactic sophistication including usage-based indices in explaining L2 writing proficiency, in comparison to the validity of length-based complexity indices. In a series of multiple regression analyses including various types of indices as predictors of the proficiency levels reflected in 3,201 sample essays, we found that the model including usage-based predictors produced explanatory power comparable to that of the model including length-based indices. However, when we incorporated both usage-and length-based indices in a single regression model, we found that the integrated model had a stronger explanatory power than the length-based and usage-based models, respectively. These results suggest that the proposed usage-based indices can serve as reliable measures of L2 syntactic complexity and may supplement length-based indices.
This methods showcase article provides a detailed overview of a mixed‐effects modeling analysis of corpus data on the use of that in object and subject complementation by native speakers of English compared to its use by German and Spanish learners of English. “We emphasize that we do not claim that our illustrations are the only way to carry out these analyses, but the strategy outlined above has yielded satisfactory results.” (Bates et al., 2018, p. 5) “We emphasize that we do not claim that our illustrations are the only way to carry out these analyses, but the strategy outlined above has yielded satisfactory results.” (Bates et al., 2018, p. 5)
The current study examined the degree to which collocation use (i.e., meaningful co-occurrences of multiple words) was related to L1 raters' intuitive judgements of L2 speech. Speech samples from a picture description task performed by eighty-five Japanese learners of English with varied L2 proficiency profiles were transcribed and assessed by 10 L1 raters for global comprehensibility (how easily speech can be understood) and lexical appropriateness (the extent to which words are used adequately and naturally in context). The samples were then submitted to a range of lexical measures tapping into the collocation (frequency, association), depth (abstractness) and breadth (frequency, range) aspects of L2 vocabulary use. Results of the statistical analyses showed that the raters' comprehensibility and lexical appropriateness scores were strongly determined by the L2 speakers' use of low-frequency combinations containing infrequent, abstract and complex words (i.e., mutual information).
This study examines the relationship between oral fluency and use of multiword sequences (MWSs) across four proficiency levels (Low B1 to C1 of the Common European Framework of Reference; Council of Europe, 2001). Data from 56 learners taking the TEEP speaking test were analyzed for different measures of fluency (speed, breakdown, repair) and MWSs (frequency, proportion, association). Results showed that (a) high frequency n-grams correlated positively with articulation rate, (b) n-gram proportion correlated negatively with frequency of mid-clause pauses, and (c) n-gram association strength correlated positively with frequency of end-clause pauses and negatively with repair frequency. The qualitative analysis suggested that the test-takers borrowed some task-specific n-grams from the task instructions and used them frequently in their performance. While lower proficiency speakers used these n-grams verbatim, C1 level speakers used them competently in a variety of forms. Significant implications of the findings for phraseology and language testing research are discussed.
This cross‐sectional study investigated the impact of length of instruction, out‐of‐school exposure to foreign language input, and gender on learners’ receptive vocabulary knowledge in two foreign languages: French (first foreign language) and English (second foreign language). The findings suggest that, although length of instruction correlated positively with vocabulary knowledge in English and French, the gains remained modest when out‐of‐school exposure to the foreign language input was limited. Despite fewer years of English instruction, participants’ vocabulary knowledge in English was considerably larger than their French vocabulary knowledge, which can be explained by their large amounts of out‐of‐school exposure to English language input. Participants’ online activities in particular had a positive effect on their vocabulary knowledge in English. Although gender influenced participants’ engagement with online activities in English, gender did not have a direct effect on their vocabulary knowledge, as the structural equation modeling analysis showed.
Open Practices
This article has been awarded an Open Materials badge. The test materials are publicly accessible via the IRIS database at https://www.iris-database.org: The English VocabLab test (https://www.iris-database.org/iris/app/home/detail?id=york%3a933919) and The French VocabLab test (https://www.iris-database.Org/iris/app/home/detail?id=york%3a933777). Learn more about the Open Practices badges from the Center for Open Science: https://osf.io/tvyxz/wiki.
Analysis of data measured on different scales is a relevant challenge. Biomedical studies often focus on high-throughput datasets of, e.g., quantitative measurements. However, the need for integration of other features possibly measured on different scales, e.g. clinical or cytogenetic factors, becomes increasingly important. The analysis results (e.g. a selection of relevant genes) are then visualized, while adding further information, like clinical factors, on top. However, a more integrative approach is desirable, where all available data are analyzed jointly, and where also in the visualization different data sources are combined in a more natural way. Here we specifically target integrative visualization and present a heatmap-style graphic display. To this end, we develop and explore methods for clustering mixed-type data, with special focus on clustering variables. Clustering of variables does not receive as much attention in the literature as does clustering of samples. We extend the variables clustering methodology by two new approaches, one based on the combination of different association measures and the other on distance correlation. With simulation studies we evaluate and compare different clustering strategies. Applying specific methods for mixed-type data proves to be comparable and in many cases beneficial as compared to standard approaches applied to corresponding quantitative or binarized data. Our two novel approaches for mixed-type variables show similar or better performance than the existing methods ClustOfVar and bias-corrected mutual information. Further, in contrast to ClustOfVar, our methods provide dissimilarity matrices, which is an advantage, especially for the purpose of visualization. Real data examples aim to give an impression of various kinds of potential applications for the integrative heatmap and other graphical displays based on dissimilarity matrices. We demonstrate that the presented integrative heatmap provides more information than common data displays about the relationship among variables and samples. The described clustering and visualization methods are implemented in our R package CluMix available from https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/CluMix.
This study examines the relationship between different types of language learning aptitude (measured via the LLAMA test) and adult second language (L2) learners’ attainment in speech production in English‐as‐a‐foreign‐language (EFL) classrooms. Picture descriptions elicited from 50 Japanese EFL learners from varied proficiency levels were analyzed through a range of pronunciation, fluency, vocabulary, and grammar measures. Results indicated that the learners’ aptitude test scores in phonemic coding, rote and associative memory, and language analytic ability were moderately associated with the phonological/morphological accuracy, fluency, and lexicogrammar complexity of production, which are linguistic aspects thought to be instrumental in the acquisition of advanced L2 oral ability. In contrast, aptitude–proficiency links were not found with respect to relatively implicit and incidental learning aptitude (sound recognition) and foundational aspects of proficiency (appropriate use of frequent words).
Open Practices
This article has been awarded an Open Materials badge. All materials are publicly accessible in the IRIS digital repository at http://www.iris-database.org . Learn more about the Open Practices badges from the Center for Open Science: https://osf.io/tvyxz/wiki .
This study investigates the influence of the semantic heaviness of verbs (i.e., heavy or light verbs) and language proficiency on second language (L2) learners' use of constructional information in a sentence-sorting task and a corpus analysis. Previous studies employing a sentence-sorting task demonstrated that advanced L2 learners sorted English sentences according to argument structure constructions rather than lexical verbs. However, these studies collapsed both heavy (e.g., cut, throw) and light (e.g., get, take) verbs into a single variable, blurring the effects of the semantic heaviness of the verbs. The present study designed a sentence-sorting task involving heavy and light verbs as separate variables and administered it with advanced and intermediate adult learners of English (Experiment 1). Results showed that while advanced learners showed construction-dominant sortings regardless of the heaviness of a verb, intermediate learners produced construction-based sortings only in the light verb condition. A corpus analysis of learner essays (Experiment 2) revealed that intermediate learners relied on light verbs in producing constructions more strongly than advanced learners and native speakers. These findings suggest that L2 proficiency modulates the degree to which the semantic heaviness of a verb affects learners' use of constructional knowledge in sorting and producing English sentences.
This paper combines data from learner corpora and psycholinguistic experiments in an attempt to find out what advanced learners of English (first language backgrounds German and Spanish) know about a range of common verbargument constructions (VACs), such as the ‘V about n’ construction (e.g. she thinks about chocolate a lot). Learners’ dominant verb-VAC associations are examined based on evidence retrieved from the German and Spanish subcomponents of ICLE and LINDSEI and collected in lexical production tasks in which participants complete VAC frames (e.g. ‘he ___ about the...’) with verbs that may fill the blank (e.g. talked, thought, wondered). The paper compares findings from the different data sets and highlights the value of linking corpus and experimental evidence in studying linguistic phenomena
Maximum likelihood or restricted maximum likelihood (REML) estimates of the
parameters in linear mixed-effects models can be determined using the lmer
function in the lme4 package for R. As for most model-fitting functions in R,
the model is described in an lmer call by a formula, in this case including
both fixed- and random-effects terms. The formula and data together determine a
numerical representation of the model from which the profiled deviance or the
profiled REML criterion can be evaluated as a function of some of the model
parameters. The appropriate criterion is optimized, using one of the
constrained optimization functions in R, to provide the parameter estimates. We
describe the structure of the model, the steps in evaluating the profiled
deviance or REML criterion, and the structure of classes or types that
represents such a model. Sufficient detail is included to allow specialization
of these structures by users who wish to write functions to fit specialized
linear mixed models, such as models incorporating pedigrees or smoothing
splines, that are not easily expressible in the formula language used by lmer.
General correlations between form and meaning at the level of argument structure patterns have often been assumed to be innate. Claims of in- nateness typically rest on the idea that the input is not rich enough for gen- eral learning strategies to yield the required representations. The present work demonstrates that the semantics associated with argument structure generalizations can indeed be learned, given the nature of the input and an understanding of general categorization strategies. Examination of an ex- tensive corpus study of children's and mothers' speech shows that tokens of one particular verb are found to account for the lion's share of instances of each argument frame considered. Experimental results are reported that demonstrate that high token frequency of a single prototypical exemplar facilitates the learning of constructional meaning.
Much recent work in Cognitive Linguistics and neighbouring disciplines has adopted a so-called usage-based perspective in which generalizations are based on the analysis of authentic usage data provided by computerized corpora. However, the analysis of such data does not always utilize methodological findings from other disciplines to avoid analytical pitfalls and, at the same time, generate robust results. A case in point is the strategy of using corpus frequencies. In this paper, we take up a recently much debated issue from construction grammar concerning the association between verbs
and argument-structure constructions, and investigate a construction, the English as-predicative, in order to test the predictive power of di¤erent kinds of frequency data against that of a recent, more refined corpus-based approach, the so-called collexeme analysis. To that end, the results of the application of these corpus-based approaches to an analysis of the aspredicative are compared with the results of a sentence-completion experiment. Concerning the topic under consideration, collexeme analysis is not
only shown to be superior on a variety of theoretical and methodological grounds, it also significantly outperforms frequency as a predictor of subjects’ production preferences. We conclude by pointing out some implications for usage-based approaches.
Keywords: as-predicative; argument-structure constructions; usage-based models; corpus data; collostructional analysis; sentence completion task.
This paper presents a psycholinguistic analysis of constructions and their acquisition. It investigates effects upon naturalistic second language acquisition of type/token distributions in the islands comprising the linguistic form of English verb-argument constructions (VACs: VL verb locative, VOL verb object locative, VOO ditransitive) in the ESF corpus (Perdue, 1993).
Goldberg (2006) argued that Zipfian type/token frequency distribution of verbs in natural language might optimize construction learning by providing one very high frequency exemplar that is also prototypical in meaning. Ellis & Ferreira-Junior (2009) confirmed that in the naturalistic L2A of English, VAC verb type/token distribution in the input is Zipfian and learners first acquire the most frequent, prototypical and generic exemplar (e.g. put in VOL, give in VOO, etc.). This paper further illustrates how acquisition is affected by the frequency and frequency distribution of exemplars within each island of the construction (e.g. [Subj V Obj Oblpath/loc]), by their prototypicality, and, using a variety of psychological and corpus linguistic association metrics, by their contingency of form-function mapping.
Abstract Through the detailed investigation of the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of one GRAMMATICAL CONSTRUCTION , that containing the conjunction let alone, we explore the view that the realm of idiomaticity in a language includes a great deal that is productive, highly structured and worthy of serious grammatical investigation. It is suggested that an explanatory model of grammar,will include principles whereby,a language can associate semantic and pragmatic interpretation principles with syntactic configurations,larger and more,complex,than those definable by means,of single phrase structure rules. 1. Background
This article considers effects of construction frequency, form, function, and prototypicality on second language acquisition (SLA). It investigates these relationships by focusing on naturalistic SLA in the European Science Foundation corpus (Perdue, 1993) of the English verb–argument constructions (VACs): verb locative (VL), verb object locative (VOL), and ditransitive (VOO). Goldberg (2006) argued that Zipfian type/token frequency distributions (Zipf, 1935) in natural language constructions might optimize learning by providing one very high-frequency exemplar that is also prototypical in meaning. This article tests and confirms this proposal for naturalistic English as a second language. We show that VAC type/token distribution in the input is Zipfian and that learners first use the most frequent, prototypical, and generic exemplar (e.g., put in the VOL VAC, give in the VOO ditransitive, etc.). Learning is driven by the frequency and frequency distribution of exemplars within constructions and by the match of their meaning to the construction prototype.
To contrast mechanisms of lexical access in production versus comprehension we compared the effects of word frequency (high, low), context (none, low constraint, high constraint), and level of English proficiency (monolingual, Spanish-English bilingual, Dutch-English bilingual) on picture naming, lexical decision, and eye fixation times. Semantic constraint effects were larger in production than in reading. Frequency effects were larger in production than in reading without constraining context but larger in reading than in production with constraining context. Bilingual disadvantages were modulated by frequency in production but not in eye fixation times, were not smaller in low-constraint contexts, and were reduced by high-constraint contexts only in production and only at the lowest level of English proficiency. These results challenge existing accounts of bilingual disadvantages and reveal fundamentally different processes during lexical access across modalities, entailing a primarily semantically driven search in production but a frequency-driven search in comprehension. The apparently more interactive process in production than comprehension could simply reflect a greater number of frequency-sensitive processing stages in production.
This paper examines early syntactic development from a usage-based perspective, using transcripts of the spontaneous speech of two English-speaking children recorded at relatively dense intervals at ages 2;0 and 3;0. We focus primarily on the children's question constructions, in an effort to determine (i) what kinds of units they initially extract from the input (their size and degree of specificity/abstractness); (ii) what operations they must perform in order to construct novel utterances using these units; and (in) how the units and the operations change between the ages of two and three. In contrast to nativist theories of language development which suggest that children are working with abstract syntactic categories from an early point in development, we suggest that the data are better accounted for by the proposal that children begin with lexically specific phrases and gradually buildup a repertoire of increasingly abstract constructions.
Word frequency is the most important variable in research on word processing and memory. Yet, the main criterion for selecting word frequency norms has been the availability of the measure, rather than its quality. As a result, much research is still based on the old Kucera and Francis frequency norms. By using the lexical decision times of recently published megastudies, we show how bad this measure is and what must be done to improve it. In particular, we investigated the size of the corpus, the language register on which the corpus is based, and the definition of the frequency measure. We observed that corpus size is of practical importance for small sizes (depending on the frequency of the word), but not for sizes above 16-30 million words. As for the language register, we found that frequencies based on television and film subtitles are better than frequencies based on written sources, certainly for the monosyllabic and bisyllabic words used in psycholinguistic research. Finally, we found that lemma frequencies are not superior to word form frequencies in English and that a measure of contextual diversity is better than a measure based on raw frequency of occurrence. Part of the superiority of the latter is due to the words that are frequently used as names. Assembling a new frequency norm on the basis of these considerations turned out to predict word processing times much better than did the existing norms (including Kucera & Francis and Celex). The new SUBTL frequency norms from the SUBTLEX(US) corpus are freely available for research purposes from http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental, as well as from the University of Ghent and Lexique Web sites.
This paper introduces an extension of collocational analysis that takes into account grammatical structure and is specifically geared to investigating the interaction of lexemes and the grammatical constructions associated with them. The method is framed in a construction-based approach to language, i.e. it assumes that grammar consists of signs (form-meaning pairs) and is thus not fundamentally different from the lexicon. The method is applied to linguistic expressions at various levels of abstraction (words, semi-fixed phrases, argument structures, tense, aspect and mood). The method has two main applications: first, to increase the adequacy of grammatical description by providing an objective way of identifying the meaning of a grammatical construction and determining the degree to which particular slots in it prefer or are restricted to a particular set of lexemes; second, to provide data for linguistic theory-building.
The first verbs to participate in VO and SVO combinations, and the temporal parameters of the spread of these combinatory patterns over different verbs were investigated. The longitudinal language observations of 16 children, one acquiring English, the others Hebrew, were examined. The children were observed once a week for 3-12 months, the observations starting when the children were still in the single-word stage (1.1-2.1) and ending when they were well into multiword speech (1.8-2.7). The results indicate that the more verbs children already know to combine in a certain pattern, the faster they learn new ones. Apparently children induce from individual word-combinations some general principles that facilitate further learning. The 'pathbreaking verbs' that begin the acquisition of a novel syntactic rule tend to be generic verbs expressing the relevant combinatorial property in a relatively pure fashion: the same verbs that children first combine with direct objects, are typical grammaticalized markers of transitivity in many languages. These verbs do not have HIGH TRANSITIVITY as defined by Hopper & Thompson (1980). Rather, they express fundamental 'object relations' of incorporation into, and ejection from the personal. Crosslinguistic evidence indicates that this may be the basic transitivity construct in languages. The results raise the possibility that lexical-specific learning of positional patterns is sufficient to account for the formation of syntactic abstractions.
This study investigates the role of performance limitations in children's early acquisition of verb-argument structure. Valian (1991) claims that intransitive frames are easier for children to produce early in development than transitive frames because they do not require a direct object argument. Children who understand this distinction are expected to produce a lower proportion of transitive verb utterances early in development in comparison with later stages of development and to omit direct objects much more frequently with mixed verbs (where direct objects are optional) than with transitive verbs. To test these claims, data from nine children aged between 1;10.7 and 2;0.25 matched with Valian's subjects on MLU were examined. When analysed in terms of abstract syntactic structures Valian's findings are supported. However, a detailed lexical analysis of the data suggests that the children were not selecting argument structure on the basis of syntactic complexity.
In Speaking, Willem "Pim" Levelt, Director of the Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, accomplishes the formidable task of covering the entire process of speech production, from constraints on conversational appropriateness to articulation and self-monitoring of speech. Speaking is unique in its balanced coverage of all major aspects of the production of speech, in the completeness of its treatment of the entire speech process, and in its strategy of exemplifying rather than formalizing theoretical issues.
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Pronouns serve as early linguistic cues for the acquisition of the English transitive construction (TC), but previous research has been limited to first language (L1) settings. This study focuses on TC input in the English as a foreign language (EFL) context, investigating syntactico-semantic differences in realizations of TC arguments, particularly pronouns, between L1 parental input and Korean EFL input. To this end, four corpora were created by collecting spoken data from L1-English parents talking to their children, L1-Korean EFL teachers, L1-English EFL teachers, and auditory EFL textbooks. From these corpora, transitive clauses were extracted so that their arguments could be categorized. Mixed-effects negative binomial regression analyses and hierarchical cluster analyses (preceded by principal component analyses) showed that in the realization of TC arguments, Korean EFL input differs syntactically and semantically from L1-English parental input, both for the subjects and objects of TCs. The syntactic difference was particularly pronounced for objects, where fewer pronouns were observed in the EFL input than in the L1-English parental input. Semantically, co-occurrence regularities between transitive verbs and arguments were identified only in the L1-English input and not in the EFL input. Pedagogical implications of the findings are also discussed.
In the present study, we sought to advance the field of learner corpus research by tracking the development of phrasal vocabulary in essays produced at two different points in time. To this aim, we employed a large pool of second language (L2) learners (N = 175) from three proficiency levels—beginner, elementary, and intermediate—and focused on an underrepresented L2 (Italian). Employing mixed-effects models, a flexible and powerful tool for corpus data analysis, we analyzed learner combinations in terms of five different measures: phrase frequency, mutual information, lexical gravity, delta Pforward, and delta Pbackward . Our findings suggest a complex picture, in which higher proficiency and greater exposure to the L2 do not result in more idiomatic and targetlike output, and may, in fact, result in greater reliance on low frequency combinations whose constituent words are non-associated or mutually attracted.
Learner corpus studies using syntactic complexity as a construct for characterizing learner proficiency have found that higher proficiency permits learners to produce more complex syntactic structures. However, the majority of previous studies have focused on writing, almost exclusively with adult L2 learners. Given the fundamentally different mechanisms underlying speaking and writing activities, this study investigated (a) how different processes involved in writing and speaking performance affect child L2 learners’ sentence production and (b) whether syntactic complexity is a better predictor of proficiency in a particular production type. To this aim, we analyzed syntactic complexity for written and spoken corpora supplied by L1-Korean child learners of English using seven syntactic complexity indices. Results showed that learners used longer sentences, more subordination, more verb phrases per T-unit, and less coordination in writing than in speaking. In addition, a prediction model fitted to the written corpus explained more of the variance in proficiency scores than a model based on the spoken corpus. These findings indicate that the different processes underlying writing and speaking influence the way that beginning-level child L2 learners produce sentences in writing and speaking tasks.
Over the past 45 years, the construct of syntactic sophistication has been assessed in L2 writing using what Bulté and Housen (2012) refer to as absolute complexity (Lu, 2011; Ortega, 2003; Wolfe-Quintero, Inagaki, & Kim, 1998). However, it has been argued that making inferences about learners based on absolute complexity indices (e.g., mean length of t-unit and mean length of clause) may be difficult, both from practical and theoretical perspectives (Norris & Ortega, 2009). Furthermore, indices of absolute complexity may not align with some prominent theories of language learning such as usage-based theories (e.g., Ellis, 2002a,b). This study introduces a corpus-based approach for measuring syntactic sophistication in L2 writing using a usage-based, frequency-driven perspective. Specifically, novel computational indices related to the frequency of verb argument constructions (VACs) and the strength of association between VACs and the verbs that fill them (i.e., verb–VAC combinations) are developed. These indices are then compared against traditional indices of syntactic complexity (e.g., mean length of T-unit and mean length of clause) with regard to their ability to model one aspect of holistic scores of writing quality in Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) independent essays. Indices related to usage-based theories of syntactic development explained greater variance (R² = .142) in holistic scores of writing quality than traditional methods of assessing syntactic complexity (R² = .058). The results have important implications for modeling syntactic sophistication, L2 writing assessment, and AES systems.
The last decade has seen a growing body of research investigating various aspects of L2 learners’ performance of tasks. This book focuses on one task implementation variable: planning. It considers theories of how opportunities to plan a task affect performance and tests claims derived from these theories in a series of empirical studies. The book examines different types of planning (i.e. task rehearsal, pre-task planning and within-task planning), addressing both what learners do when they plan and the effects of the different types of planning on L2 production. The choice of planning as the variable for investigation in this book is motivated both by its importance for current theorizing about L2 acquisition (in particular with regard to cognitive theories that view acquisition in terms of information processing) and its utility to language teachers and language testers, for unlike many other constructs in SLA ‘planning’ lends itself to external manipulation. The study of planning, then, provides a suitable forum for demonstrating the interconnectedness of theory, research and pedagogy in SLA.
The book seeks to enlarge the theoretical scope, research agenda, and practices associated with TBLT in a two-way dynamic, by exploring how insights from writing might reconfigure our understanding of tasks and, in turn, how work associated with TBLT might benefit the learning and teaching of writing. In order to enrich the domain of task and to advance the educational interests of TBLT, it adopts both a psycholinguistic and a textual meaning-making orientation. Following an issues-oriented introductory chapter, Part I of the volume explores tenets, methods, and findings in task-oriented theory and research in the context of writing; the chapters in Part II present empirical findings on task-based writing by investigating how writing tasks are implemented, how writers differentially respond to tasks, and how tasks can contribute to language development. A coda chapter summarizes the volume’s contribution and suggests directions for advancing TBLT constructs and research agendas.
This book investigates the nature of generalizations in language, drawing parallels between our linguistic knowledge and more general conceptual knowledge. The book combines theoretical, corpus, and experimental methodology to provide a constructionist account of how linguistic generalizations are learned, and how cross-linguistic and language-internal generalizations can be explained. Part I argues that broad generalizations involve the surface forms in language, and that much of our knowledge of language consists of a delicate balance of specific items and generalizations over those items. Part II addresses issues surrounding how and why generalizations are learned and how they are constrained. Part III demonstrates how independently needed pragmatic and cognitive processes can account for language-internal and cross-linguistic generalizations, without appeal to stipulations that are specific to language.
This book brings together papers by the foremost representatives of a range of theoretical and empirical approaches converging on a common goal: to account for language use, or how speakers actually speak and understand language. Crucial to a usage-based approach are frequency, statistical patterns, and, most generally, linguistic experience. Linguistic competence is not seen as cognitively-encapsulated and divorced from performance, but as a system continually shaped, from inception, by linguistic usage events. The authors represented here were among the first to leave behind rule-based linguistic representations in favour of constraint-based systems whose structural properties actually emerge from usage. Such emergentist systems evince far greater cognitive and neurological plausibility than algorithmic, generative models. Approaches represented here include Cognitive Grammar, the Lexical Network Model, Competition Model, Relational Network Model, and accessibility Theory. The empirical data come from phonological variation, syntactic change, psycholinguistic experiments, discourse, connectionist modelling of language acquisition, and linguistic corpora.
This cutting-edge volume describes the implications of Cognitive Linguistics for the study of second language acquisition (SLA). The first two sections identify theoretical and empirical strands of Cognitive Linguistics, presenting them as a coherent whole. The third section discusses the relevance of Cognitive Linguistics to SLA and defines a research agenda linking these fields with implications for language instruction. Its comprehensive range and tutorial-style chapters make this handbook a valuable resource for students and researchers alike.
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The analysis of spoken language requires a principled way of dividing transcribed data into units in order to assess features such as accuracy and complexity. If such analyses are to be comparable across different studies, there must be agreement on the nature of the unit, and it must be possible to apply this unit reliably to a range of different types of speech data. There are a number of different units in use, the various merits of which have been discussed by Crookes (1990). However, while these have been used to facilitate the analysis of spoken language data, there is presently no comprehensive, accessible definition of any of them, nor are detailed guides available on how to identify such units in data sets. Research reports tend to provide simplistic two-line definitions of units exemplified, if at all, by unproblematic written examples. These are inadequate when applied to transcriptions of complex oral data, which tend not to lend themselves easily to a clear division into units. This paper was motivated by the need each of the three authors felt for a reliable and comprehensively defined unit to assist with they analysis of a variety of recordings of native and non-native speakers of English. We first discuss in very general terms the criteria according to which such a unit might be selected. Next, we examine the main categories of unit which have been adopted previously and provide a justification for the particular type of unit that we have chosen. Focusing on this unit, we identify a number of problems which are associated with the definition and exemplification of units of this type, and give examples of the awkward cases found in actual data. Finally we offer a definition of our unit, the Analysis of Speech Unit (AS-unit), providing adequate detail to address the problematic data analyses we have illustrated
A review of clustering methodology is presented, with emphasis on algorithm performance and the re sulting implications for applied research. After an over view of the clustering literature, the clustering process is discussed within a seven-step framework. The four major types of clustering methods can be characterized as hierarchical, partitioning, overlapping, and ordina tion algorithms. The validation of such algorithms re fers to the problem of determining the ability of the methods to recover cluster configurations which are known to exist in the data. Validation approaches in clude mathematical derivations, analyses of empirical datasets, and monte carlo simulation methods. Next, interpretation and inference procedures in cluster anal ysis are discussed. inference procedures involve test ing for significant cluster structure and the problem of determining the number of clusters in the data. The paper concludes with two sets of recommendations. One set deals with topics in clustering that would ben efit from continued research into the methodology. The other set offers recommendations for applied anal yses within the framework of the clustering process.
What types of linguistic information do people use to construct the meaning of a sentence? Most linguistic theories and psycholinguistic models of sentence comprehension assume that the main determinant of sentence meaning is the verb. This idea was argued explicitly in Healy and Miller (1970). When asked to sort sentences according to their meaning, Healy and Miller found that participants were more likely to sort sentences according to the main verb in the sentence than according to the subject argument. On the basis of these results, the authors concluded that the verb was the main determinant of sentence meaning. In this study we used the same sorting paradigm to explore the possibility that there is another strong influence on sentence interpretation: the configuration of complements (the argument structure construction). Our results showed that participants did produce sorts by construction, despite a well-documented tendency for subjects to sort on the basis of a single dimension, which would favor sorts by verb.
consider how working memory supports cognition in writing / [discuss] the nature of writing and working memory / the basic processes of 3 systems of language production are reviewed: the formulation of ideas and linguistic expression; the motor execution of speech, handwriting, or typing; and the monitoring of these production systems / each system involves 2 basic processes and numerous subprocesses / follow this sketch with a proposal regarding the demands made by the basic processes on the central executive, the phonological loop, and the visuo-spatial sketchpad resources of working memory / turn to the writing research that partially tests the model's predictions and suggests directions for further research (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This study examines style shifting in the use of three past tense morphemes (regular past, irregular past, and past copula) by 17 intermediate L2 learners of English. It differs from previous studies in that style shifting is examined within a single discourse mode—narrative discourse—according to the amount of planning time made available. Data were collected under three conditions: (a) planned writing, (b) planned speech, and (c) unplanned speech. Different patterns of style shifting were observed for three morphemes, suggesting that the nature of the linguistic feature under investigation is a determining factor. For regular past, greatest accuracy was most evident in planned writing and least evident in unplanned speech, with planned speech intermediate. Little style shifting took place in irregular past, whereas style shifting for past copula occurred only between planned speech and unplanned speech. The three conditions produced different accuracy orders for regular and irregular past, suggesting that the so-called “natural” order may not be a stable phenomenon. The paper concludes with a number of important questions requiring further investigation.
This article presents an analysis of interactions in the usage, structure, cognition, coadaptation of conversational partners, and emergence of linguistic constructions. It focuses on second language development of English verb-argument constructions (VACs: VL, verb locative; VOL, verb object locative; VOO, ditransitive) with particular reference to the following: (a) Construction learning as concept learning following the general cognitive and associative processes of the induction of categories from experience of exemplars in usage obtained through coadapted micro-discursive interaction with conversation partners; (b) the empirical analysis of usage by means of corpus linguistic descriptions of native and nonnative speech and of longitudinal emergence in the interlanguage of second language learners; (c) the effects of the frequency and Zipfian type/token frequency distribution of exemplars within the Verb and other islands of the construction archipelago (e.g., [Subj V Obj Oblpath/loc]), by their prototypicality, their generic coverage, and their contingency of form-meaning-use mapping, and (d) computational (emergent connectionist) models of these various factors as they play out in the emergence of constructions as generalized linguistic schema.
This paper provides an introduction to mixed-effects models for the analysis of repeated measurement data with subjects and items as crossed random effects. A worked-out example of how to use recent software for mixed-effects modeling is provided. Simulation studies illustrate the advantages offered by mixed-effects analyses compared to traditional analyses based on quasi-F tests, by-subjects analyses, combined by-subjects and by-items analyses, and random regression. Applications and possibilities across a range of domains of inquiry are discussed.
The Corpus of Contemporary American English is the first large, genre-balanced corpus of any language, which has been designed and constructed from the ground up as a 'monitor corpus', and which can be used to accurately track and study recent changes in the language. The 400 million words corpus is evenly divided between spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic journals. Most importantly, the genre balance stays almost exactly the same from year to year, which allows it to accurately model changes in the 'real world'. After discussing the corpus design, we provide a number of concrete examples of how the corpus can be used to look at recent changes in English, including morphology (new suffixes -friendly and -gate), syntax (including prescriptive rules, quotative like, so not ADJ, the get passive, resultatives, and verb complementation), semantics (such as changes in meaning with web, green, or gay), and lexis-including word and phrase frequency by year, and using the corpus architecture to produce lists of all words that have had large shifts in frequency between specific historical periods. © The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of ALLC and ACH. All rights reserved.
Twenty-four children between 2;5 and 3;1 were taught two nonce verbs. Each verb was used multiple times by an adult experimenter to refer to a highly transitive action involving a mostly animate agent (including the child herself) and a patient of varying animacy. One of the verbs was modelled in the Two-Participants condition in which the experimenter said: 'Look. Big Bird is dopping the boat'. The other verb was modelled in the No-Participant condition in which the experimenter named the Two-Participants but did not use them as arguments of the novel verb: 'Look what Big Bird is doing to the boat. It's called keefing'. It was found that whereas many children produced transitive sentences with the Two-Participants verb, only children close to 3;0 produced transitive sentences with the No-Participant verb. This age is somewhat younger than previous studies in which young children were asked to produce transitive sentences with two lexical nouns for the two animate participants. Also, re-analyses of previously published studies in which children learned novel verbs in sentence frames without arguments found that the few transitive sentences produced by children under 2;6 involved either I or me as subject. One hypothesis is thus that as young children in the third year of life begin to construct a more abstract and verb-general transitive construction, this construction initially contains only certain types of participants expressed in only certain kinds of linguistic forms.