Abstract: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 are not necessarily ungrammatical, yet often non-idiomatic, and (ii) German learners are overall more attuned to native-like choices than Spanish learners. A prelimina… Show more
“…This may seem perplexing given that specificity is mostly marked by definite and indefinite articles in English, and their L2 acquisition is one of the most notoriously difficult aspects of the English grammar for most learners of English (cf. Master 1997, Butler 2002, Miller 2005. However, the specificity preferences are compatible with, although not completely identical to, another widely-attested constituent ordering preference -given-before-new -and may be recast in terms of difficulty of establishing reference.…”
Section: Commonalities Of Native Language and Interlanguagementioning
confidence: 83%
“…In corpus-based SLA research, alternations have generally received only limited attention (for a few exceptions, see Gries & Wulff 2005Callies & Szczesniak 2008;Martinez-Garcia & Wulff 2012). In contrast, as far as native English data are concerned, alternations are among the most intensively researched phenomena.…”
Section: Previous Research On the Genitive Alternation In Nlmentioning
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 the 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 component of the International Corpus of English that were coded for 12 factors. Importantly, the speakers' L1 was included as a predictor to be able to compare properly the native speakers with the learners as well as the two learner groups with each other. The final regression model predicts all speakers' genitive choices very accurately (> 93%) and suggests that (i) the learners rely heavily on processing-related factors, which can be overridden by semantic constraints, and (ii) learners' choices are differentially modulated by their L1. We close with a discussion of how this context-based, multifactorial approach goes beyond traditional learner corpus research.
“…This may seem perplexing given that specificity is mostly marked by definite and indefinite articles in English, and their L2 acquisition is one of the most notoriously difficult aspects of the English grammar for most learners of English (cf. Master 1997, Butler 2002, Miller 2005. However, the specificity preferences are compatible with, although not completely identical to, another widely-attested constituent ordering preference -given-before-new -and may be recast in terms of difficulty of establishing reference.…”
Section: Commonalities Of Native Language and Interlanguagementioning
confidence: 83%
“…In corpus-based SLA research, alternations have generally received only limited attention (for a few exceptions, see Gries & Wulff 2005Callies & Szczesniak 2008;Martinez-Garcia & Wulff 2012). In contrast, as far as native English data are concerned, alternations are among the most intensively researched phenomena.…”
Section: Previous Research On the Genitive Alternation In Nlmentioning
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 the 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 component of the International Corpus of English that were coded for 12 factors. Importantly, the speakers' L1 was included as a predictor to be able to compare properly the native speakers with the learners as well as the two learner groups with each other. The final regression model predicts all speakers' genitive choices very accurately (> 93%) and suggests that (i) the learners rely heavily on processing-related factors, which can be overridden by semantic constraints, and (ii) learners' choices are differentially modulated by their L1. We close with a discussion of how this context-based, multifactorial approach goes beyond traditional learner corpus research.
“…Supportive evidence comes from Hopp (2013), who found evidence that the anticipatory use of gender information is correlated with the speed of lexical access, in native as well as non-native speakers. In addition, native speakers under time pressure make errors similar to language-learners (Hopp, 2010;McDonald, 2006). A processing deficit account is also directly compatible with a prediction-based approach.…”
Section: Models Of L2 Processingmentioning
confidence: 92%
“…Hopp (Hopp, 2009(Hopp, , 2010 and McDonald (McDonald, 2006), differences between native and non-native speakers can be mainly attributed to resource deficits. Non-native speakers may be slower in accessing lexical items in the L2, or in applying parsing routines that are automatic in native speakers.…”
There is ample evidence that native speakers anticipate upcoming information at various levels during sentence comprehension. In contrast, some studies on late second-language (L2) learners support the view that L2 learners do not anticipate information during processing, or at least, not to the same extent as native speakers do. In the current paper, I propose that native and L2 speakers are underlyingly the same as far as sentence processing mechanisms are concerned, and that potential differences in anticipatory behavior can be accounted for by the same factors that drive individual differences in native speakers; in particular, differences in frequency biases, competing information, the accuracy and consistency of the lexical representation, and task-induced effects. Suggestions for future research are provided.
“…For example, Hubbard and Hix () observed that intermediate and even advanced adult learners of English continue to produce verbs in “constructions they do not belong in” (p. 89). That is, except at the very highest levels of proficiency, L2 learners of English are prone to produce certain errors like those in Example 1 that were found online (Bley‐Vroman & Joo, ; Bley‐Vroman & Yoshinaga, ; Hubbard & Hix, ; Inagaki, ; Martinez‐Garcia & Wulff, ; Oh, ). Example 1a.…”
Native speakers strongly disprefer novel formulations when a conventional alternative expresses the same intended message, presumably because the more conventional form competes with the novel form. In five studies, second language (L2) speakers were less influenced by competing alternatives than native speakers. L2 speakers accepted novel interpretable sentences more readily than native speakers, and were somewhat less likely to offer competing alternatives as paraphrases or to prefer competing alternatives in forced‐choice tasks. They were unaffected by exposure to competing alternatives immediately before judgments. Reduced sensitivity to competing alternatives was confirmed by L2 speakers’ greater divergence from native speakers on judgments for novel formulations compared to familiar ones. Reduced sensitivity to competing alternatives also predicts noisier linguistic representations; consistent with this, L2 speakers performed worse on a verbatim recognition task, with performance correlating with more nativelike judgments. Proficiency was a modest predictor of judgments, but transfer effects were not.
Open Practices
This article has been awarded a Preregistered Research Design badge. Preregistration for this study's research design and analyses is publicly accessible through AsPredicted.org. Direct links to the five preregistered experiments are available in the Supporting Information file. Learn more about the Open Practices badges from the Center for Open Science: https://osf.io/tvyxz/wiki.
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