Typology and information organisation: perspective taking and Language-specific effects in the construal of events

Linkage in narratives: A comparison between monolingual speakers of French and Italian, and early and late French-Italian bilinguals

“…Levelt 1989Levelt , 1999, the frame of analysis for the present study is based on findings with regard to the role of core grammatical features such as word order constraints, null-subject, grammaticalized aspect, for information organization for the text as a whole (cf. Carroll and von Stutterheim 2003;von Stutterheim, Carroll and Klein 2003;Carroll et al 2008). The relevance for textual planning, as well as acquisition, is that decisions are not solved for each utterance in turn, but also rely on planning principles that hold on a default basis in language production for a given text type.…”

Judgments of information structure in L2 French: Nativelike performance and the Critical Period Hypothesis

“…The acquisition of information structure by adult L2 learners has previously been examined as it relates to the syntactic constructions employed by L2 learners in discourse and narrative (e.g., Carroll et al 2000). Some previous studies have used production data to examine the acquisition of finiteness in L2 learners of French (Schlyter 2003) and German (Dimroth et al 2003;Dimroth 2008); others have studied anaphora in narrative (Carroll and Lambert 2003), the production of topic markers (Ferdinand 2002), and the grammatical means used to organize information in learner varieties of German and English (Carroll & von Stutterheim 2003). While many existing studies have examined the assignment of information structure to sentences, fewer studies have looked at L2 learners' ability to identify and process anomalies in the information structure of a sentence, and those that have looked at this have targeted L2 learners' sensitivity to information structure distinctions communicated by word order (e.g., Wilson et al 2007 for German; Kaiser & Trueswell 2004 for Finnish).…”

Express-ability in ELF communication

“…Investigating the construal of events by native speakers of English and German (who were also advanced L2 learners of the other language), Carrol and von Stutterheim (2003) found conditioning effects of language on event construal and observed that these effects become firmly established by the time a native speaker reaches early adolescence, so that the conditioning effects of the L1 are subsequently carried over into a person's reference to events in an L2. In more concrete terms, languages with the grammatical means of marking imperfective aspect sensitize their speakers to the phasal qualities of events; this greater sensitivity to the phasal qualities of ongoing events results in a defocusing of endpoints, thus making endpoints less relevant and consequently less frequently mentioned in descriptions of certain types of events.…”