Economy in the acquisition of English universal quantifier sentences: The interpretations of deaf and hearing students and second language learners at the college level

Abstract

English sentences containing the universal quantifiers each, every, and all are highly complex structures in view of the subtleties of their scope properties and resulting ambiguities. This study explored the acquisition of universal quantifier sentences as reflected in the performance of three diverse collegelevel student groups on a multipicture sentence interpretation task. The participant groups (hearing native speakers, deaf students, and second language learners of English) all exhibited fundamental knowledge of universal lexical, semantic, and syntactic properties that contribute to quantifier sentence interpretation. The native speakers outperformed the deaf and second language groups, whose performance was strikingly parallel. Performance patterns are explained in terms of the influences of derivational economy, including the option to restrict in situ indefinite noun phrases to singleton indefinites. The symmetry effect observed in child language studies was also observed among the college-aged participants in this study. It is explained in terms of a pragmatic challenge in managing contextual information that invokes an unexpected singleton indefinite interpretation. The results contribute to the understanding of sentence comprehension under conditions of restricted learner access to target language input and underscore the value of seeking correlates of theory-internal derivational economy in language acquisition and use.

The Development of Antonym Knowledge in American Sign Language (ASL) and Its Relationship to Reading Comprehension in English

“…However, many other deaf students do not achieve high levels of English proficiency. Those who are born to hearing parents and are not exposed to a sign language (e.g., ASL) at an early age cannot be described as native users of the sign language (see, e.g., Mayberry & Lock, 2003 delay in their spoken language shows patterns of language performance similar to L2 learners (Berent, Kelly, & Schueler-Choukairi, 2009, 2012Bochner & Bochner, 2009). Thus, many deaf individuals can neither be described as native users of the spoken language of the hearing community nor as native users of a sign language.…”

L2 and Deaf Learners’ Knowledge of Numerically Quantified English Sentences

“…The figure also shows that even the L1 group accepted fewer NP-QP distributive interpretations of sentences like (2b) in view of the computational cost associated with derivations involving QR (Reinhart, 2006).

Figure 1.Acceptance of collective and distributive depictions of universal quantifier sentence types by group, based on the results of Berent et al (2009).

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“…It is this later language learning under conditions of restricted input access and intake (whether the restriction is cognitive or auditory) that presumably yields so many L2 learner–deaf learner interlanguage parallels. As argued in Berent (2009) and Berent et al (2009), it is the restricted input access that renders L2 and deaf learners more vulnerable (than L1 speakers) to the pressures of derivational economy and that shapes the acquisitional parallels.…”

“…Assuming these derivational processes, Berent et al (2009) predicted that learners who acquire English under conditions of restricted input access (i.e., L2 learners and deaf learners) would exhibit interlanguage knowledge that results from the relative degrees of acquisitional pressure tied to derivational economy and complexity (see Yusa, 1998). Thus, the learners’ predicted order of success would be as shown in (6), where the label QP-NP refers to universally quantified sentences in which the QP precedes the singular indefinite NP and NP-QP refers to the opposite order.a.…”

“…There were four learner groups in Berent et al (2009) and one control group of hearing L1 speakers of English (L1). There were two participant groups of hearing L2 learners: the L2-L group with lower overall English proficiency and the L2-H group with higher overall English proficiency.…”