Revisiting Zipfian Frequency: L2 Acquisition of English Prenominal Past Participles

Abstract

This study examined the effectiveness of Zipfian frequency at facilitating the acquisition of English prenominal past participles. Chinese middle school students (N = 103) were randomly assigned to a sequenced Zipfian frequency (SZF) group, a random Zipfian frequency (RZF) group, a balanced frequency (BF) group, and a control group. A mixed experimental design was used to detect the development of the learners' prenominal past participles. An untimed acceptability judgment task and a timed grammaticality judgment task were employed to assess the learning effect triggered by different types of frequency. Results of the timed grammaticality judgment task indicated that SZF was as effective as RZF and BF for learners to learn the grammatical prenominal past participles but more effective than RZF and BF for them to unlearn the ungrammatical ones in the midtest. Results of the untimed acceptability judgment showed that SZF was not superior to RZF and BF when learners learned the grammatical prenominal past participles, but more beneficial for them to unlearn the ungrammatical ones than RZF and BF in the post-and delayed posttests. Pedagogical implications for second language construction teaching are discussed.Keywords: Zipfian frequency; L2 acquisition; English prenominal past participles; Chinese speakers; untimed acceptability judgment task; timed grammaticality judgment task USAGE-BASED APPROACHES VIEW THE language learning process as statistically driven and experientially adaptive, starting with accumulating specific constructions to forming maximally abstract construction schemata in language users (Bybee, 2008;N. Ellis, 2012;N. Ellis & Ferreira-Junior, 2009; N. Ellis & LarsenFreeman, 2009;N. Ellis & O'Donnell, 2012;Eskildsen, 2009). In this process, the construction schema emerges from "the frequency-biased abstraction of regularities" within all instances of the target construction (N. 2009, p. 92). This view assumes that learners develop construction schemata statistically by analyzing concrete utterances when exposed to the target language (Kemmer & Barlow, 2000;Tomasello, 2003). Zipfian frequency distribution suggests that the frequency of words decreases as a power function of their rank in the frequency table. As one of the most important statistical properties of language and daily language use, it has been theorized to facilitate first language (L1) acquisition (Ambridge et al., 2006;Boyd & Goldberg, 2009;Childers & Tomasello, 2003;N. Ellis & Cadierno, 2009;Goldberg, 2006;Kidd, Lieven, & Tomasello, 2006), because some instances of a construction are used a geometrically greater number of times than others (N. Ellis, O'Donnell, & Römer, 2013; Larsen-Freeman, 2 The Modern Language Journal 100 (2016) 2011; Zipf, 1935), making the construction easier to anchor and therefore learnable. This account has been empirically substantiated by studies of L1 development (e.g., Goldberg, 2006;Goldberg, Casenhiser, & Sethuraman, 2004).EllisHowever, most experimental studies of second language (L2) learning u...

Input frequency and construction interference interactions in L2 development

“…Dong and Zhang (2017) probed how Zipfian and balanced input affected L2 development of English pronominal adjective participles and object-extracted relative clauses. They observed that Zipfian input was superior to balanced input in L2 learning of English pronominal adjective participles, confirming the conclusion of Zhang and Dong (2016), while the two distributions played no differential role in L2 development of object-extracted relative clauses. They concluded that the two distributions may not differ in the L2 learners’ development of abstract constructions.…”

“…The token frequency of each verb in the balanced input of Year and Gordon (2009) was eight, almost four times as high as that in Goldberg et al (2004), Zhang and Dong (2016), and Dong and Zhang (2017). Also, the token frequency of exemplars in the Zipfian input varied, with eight times in Goldberg et al (2004) and McDonough and Nekrasova-Becker (2014), twenty-four times in Year and Gordon (2009), seven times in Zhang and Dong (2016), twelve times in McDonough and Trofimovich (2013), and fifteen times in Fulga and McDonough (2016). Great variance in token frequencies in the intended input is likely to influence the observed effects of input distributions, since Zhang and Ma (2014) found that six occurrence events are enough for L2 learners to acquire a new instance of a VAC.…”

“…Significant effect was observed for L1 background instead of visuals and Zipfian/balanced frequency in the L2 learners’ detection of Esperanto transitives. However, Zhang and Dong (2016) investigated how Zipfian and balanced input influenced Chinese speakers’ acquisition of English prenominal adjective participles, finding that Zipfian input was more effective than balanced input for learners to reject the ungrammatical prenominal adjective participles. Dong and Zhang (2017) probed how Zipfian and balanced input affected L2 development of English pronominal adjective participles and object-extracted relative clauses.…”

Applied Cognitive Construction Grammar: A usage-based approach to the teaching of phrasal verbs (and other constructions)

“…As shown by previous research into the facilitative effects of Zipfian frequencies (e.g. Zhang and Dong 2016), the exposure of learners to prototypical construction (such as PV-ASC attachment patterns) is advantageous. What underlies this task is presumably the most fundamental of all assumptions in ACCxG, namely that, at early stages of language acquisition, the inclusion of specific PVs should be guided by natural occurring categories (Rosch et al 1976), rather than abstract, arbitrarily assigned levels of linguistic difficulty.…”

Construction Learning by Child Learners of Foreign Language: Input Distribution and Learner Factors

“…Many studies have found no major advantage for either skewed or balanced input in the acquisition of a new construction by FL learners. These studies cover a range of constructions and participants, such as prenominal adjective participles (Zhang & Dong, 2016) and relative clauses (Zhang & Dong, 2019) in teenaged Chinese learners of English, Russian morphology in U.S. college students (Brooks, Kwoka, & Kempe, 2017), and past counterfactuals (Révész, Sachs, & Hama, 2014) and Esperanto transitives (Fulga & McDonough, 2016) in ESL students. The tasks employed to examine the effect of input also vary, including grammaticality judgement (Zhang & Dong, 2016), written production (Zhang & Dong, 2019), forced‐choice comprehension (Fulga & McDonough, 2016; Révész et al., 2014), and oral production (Brooks et al., 2017; Révész et al., 2014).…”