The Emergence of Language Comprehension

MacDonald, Maryellen C.

doi:10.1002/9781118346136.ch3

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…For example, Hawkins's (, ) grammatical efficiency theory, to be placed in the usage‐based/emergentist school, aims at accounting for the design of grammars (of natural languages) on the basis of language performance (language production and comprehension). For Hawkins, phenomena of human sentence processing constitute the empirical domain of his efficiency theory, and this theory consists of various principles that govern sentence processing (see also MacDonald, ).…”

Section: Underlying Theoretical Matters: Generative Versus Usage‐basementioning

confidence: 99%

An Individual‐Differences Framework for Comparing Nonnative With Native Speakers: Perspectives From BLC Theory

Hulstijn

2018

Language Learning

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This article proposes basic (shared) and extended (nonshared) language cognition in native speakers as a function of two types of extralinguistic attributes: (a) degree of being multilingual and (b) variables related to amount and type of literacy experiences (e.g., level of education). This approach may throw new light on the question of whether bilinguals can attain complete or native proficiency in two (or more) languages and the question of whether both early and late second language (L2) learners can attain native levels of L2 proficiency. An adequate language acquisition theory should explain why some structures are and some other structures are not comprehended and produced by all native speakers and also describe the acquisition over time (development) of lexical‐grammatical structures comprehended or produced by all native speakers or only by some. It is argued that usage‐based linguistics stands a better chance of accomplishing this task than generative linguistics.

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Section: Underlying Theoretical Matters: Generative Versus Usage‐basementioning

confidence: 99%

An Individual‐Differences Framework for Comparing Nonnative With Native Speakers: Perspectives From BLC Theory

Hulstijn

2018

Language Learning

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“…A further recent framework focusing on interference is the PDC (Production-DistributionComprehension) account (Gennari et al 2012;MacDonald 2013MacDonald , 2015. This argues that interference is predominantly a constraint on language production, not comprehension.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A discourse account of intervention phenomena: An investigation of interrogatives

Riches

Garraffa²

2017

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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Sentences where like-moves-over-like, e.g. this is the cat that the dog was chasing , have occupied language researchers over the past two decades. They are often described as "intervention" sentences as one element intervenes in the movement of another. Such structures are difficult to comprehend by children or adults, and this effect is exacerbated in language-impaired individuals. Dominant theories, e.g. Rizzi's Relativised Minimality (RM), propose that the two NPs interfere with each other by virtue of having overlapping features. However, such sentences are also rarely encountered due to discourse constraints. For example, subject NPs (the dog) tend to be pronominal as they are typically aligned with topic-hood. This paper investigates whether discourse can account for intervention in questions. It employs a mixed methodology. Firstly, corpora were investigated to assess the degree to which discourse impacts on input frequency. Secondly, a behavioural study was conducted to unpack the relationship between frequency and processing in children. It was found that the input frequencies of intervention structures are predominantly influenced by discourse, and that intervention structures are vanishingly rare in the input. However, a link between frequency and processing was not observed, with the findings more supportive of RM. It is suggested that a consideration of discourse as an external phenomenon may yield new insights into intervention structures.

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The role of verbal working memory in L2 sentence comprehension

Kerz¹,

Wiechmann

2020

JSLS

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Considerable variability has been observed in sentence comprehension abilities in both native speakers and second language (L2) learner populations. While it has long been established that, in native speakers, this variability is closely linked to individual differences (IDs) in verbal working memory (vWM), previous research on the role of vWM in L2 sentence comprehension has produced mixed results. Moreover, there is an accumulating body of evidence demonstrating that the relationship between vWM and native language comprehension abilities is mediated by language experience. However, to our knowledge, until now, no attempt has been made to integrate language experience measures into the vWM-L2 sentence comprehension relationship. The goal of the present study is twofold: (1) to determine whether and to what extent vWM – as gauged by a reading span (RSPAN) task – correlates with IDs in two proxy estimates of L2 experience and (2) to investigate the effects of vWM on L2 comprehension of three different types of complex sentences. Thirty-four German advanced learners of English participated in this study. Significant positive correlations were found between the RSPAN scores and both proxy estimates of L2 experience. Mixed-effects modeling revealed that vWM exerted a significant effect on L2 sentence comprehension that was not modulated by sentence type. Taken together, these results provide additional evidence in support of the involvement of vWM in L2 sentence comprehension and, to our knowledge, first evidence for the contribution of L2 experience to RSPAN task performance.

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The Emergence of Language Comprehension

Cited by 5 publications

References 47 publications

An Individual‐Differences Framework for Comparing Nonnative With Native Speakers: Perspectives From BLC Theory

An Individual‐Differences Framework for Comparing Nonnative With Native Speakers: Perspectives From BLC Theory

A discourse account of intervention phenomena: An investigation of interrogatives

The role of verbal working memory in L2 sentence comprehension

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