Strategies for linking information by German and Japanese native Speakers and by German learners of Japanese

Abstract

The study examines which strategies native speakers of German, native speakers of Japanese and advanced German learners of Japanese adopt when linking information in narrative texts (film retellings). The main results are as follows: (a) The L1 German speakers organize temporal shift-relations in order to link information, whereas the protagonist in topic function is often maintained across utterances. In contrast, the Japanese speakers prefer to compare series of events involving each of the main characters by organizing a shift in the entity domain. (b)The L2 strategies cannot be explained by a single feature, as various factors are seen to interact in the L2 speakers' decision making. In particular, the organization of information from the domain of time is directly related to the principles in the source language.

Convergence of temporal reference frames in sequential bilinguals: event structuring unique to second language users

“…Of similarly close relevance to this study, Natale (2013) and Tomita (2013) identified symptoms of converged concepts in late bilinguals' narratives. Natale (2013) examined principles of subordination in the film retellings of French learners of Italian.…”

“…With focus on language production studies, evidence was documented both in favour of conceptual restructuring in the direction of the L2 (e.g., Cadierno, 2004; Hohenstein, Eisenberg & Naigles, 2006; Wolff & Ventura, 2009, for motion events), as well as against it (e.g., Cadierno & Ruiz, 2006, for voluntary and caused motion; Carroll & Lambert, 2003; Schmiedtová, von Stutterheim & Carroll, 2011, for event construal). Convergence in production patterns, i.e., linguistic performance not conforming to either the L1 or the L2 but found to be a hybrid of the source and the target patterns, was reported for language production of late bilinguals in the expression of caused motion (Hendriks, Hickmann & Demagny, 2008), in temporal subordination (Natale, 2013), additive and contrastive event linkage (Tomita, 2013), and also event linearization (Vanek, 2013).…”

“…Learners typically used temporal subordinate clauses, also for situations where this type of linking played a “minor role” (p. 163). In Tomita (2013), film retellings of advanced German learners of Japanese exhibited an interesting type of convergence of L1 and L2 principles pertaining to strategies for contrastive event linkage. Whilst German L1 speakers typically preferred to follow a shift-in-TIME principle ( P did not do X at time Z.…”

Additive Linking in Second Language Discourse: Lexical, Syntactic and Discourse Organizational Choices in Intermediate and Advanced Learners of L2 German with L1 French

“…von Stutterheim, 2003;Lambert et al, 2008, for spatial and temporal information; Bohnacker & Rosén, 2008, for the impact of information structure on word order; Ahrenholz, 2005;Leclercq & Lenart, 2013, for referring expressions). The picture emerging r om studies addressing the L2 acquisition of additive and contrastive linking of information units in discourse Benazzo et al, 2012;Tomita, 2013) is rather mixed. We will consider the fi ndings in more detail here, since the three studies are based 9.…”

Defying chronology: Crosslinguistic variation in reverse order reports

“…In the production domain, several lines of inquiry have been pursued to test how grammatical aspect systems in different languages modulate processes involved in retrieving event information from the knowledge base. The language combinations examined to date include Czech and Russian (Schmiedtová and Sahonenko 2008); Dutch, English and German (von Stutterheim et al 2009); Czech, English and Hungarian (Vanek and Hendriks 2015); Japanese and German (Tomita 2013), Swedish and Spanish (Bylund 2011). Analyses of video retellings showed that speakers of languages with the concept of ongoingness fully grammaticalised in T Vanek, N. & Mertins, B.…”