Unveiling linguistic competence by facilitating performance

Abstract

This dissertation looks at the question of whether the source of language learners' poor performance is a deficit in knowledge or a performance problem. Two constructions are examined, both being cases in which learners have been reported to show deficits in linguistic competence: (1) Korean OSV (e.g., Elmo-lul Big Bird-ka anayo. 'Elmo, Big Bird is hugging.'), where knowledge of both scrambling and case markers is necessary for target performance; (2) the English tough construction (English TC; e.g., The doll i is easy to see e i ), where knowledge of tough movement is necessary for target performance (i.e., the object interpretation only). If poor performance (operationalized as chance performance or below) is due to a failure to apply knowledge rather than the absence of knowledge, good performance (i.e., significantly-above-chance performance) should emerge with the effective manipulation of non-grammatical factors to facilitate learners' application of knowledge. I experimentally tested this hypothesis in two studies, employing both (a) sentence-internal manipulations and (b) sentence-external manipulations. The Korean OSV study collected data from Korean Heritage children (KHC) (n = 31) as well as two groups of native Korean-speaking children, a younger group (n = 21) and an older group (n = 23). The English TC study collected data from native Korean-speaking adult L2ers of English (n = 49) and native Korean-speaking child L2ers of English (n = 30), along with adult native speaker controls (n = 10). Study 1:Knowledge of scrambling and case in Korean was assessed, first, via picture-selection comprehension tasks that (a) manipulated the prosodic salience of case markers and (b) manipulated context to make the direct object a natural scrambled topic, and, second, via a production task eliciting case markers. The results suggested three possible sources of poor performance. Many participants showed good performance only in the manipulation conditions (vs. the baseline condition), suggesting that their poor performance in the baseline condition could be due to a performance problem (e.g., perception failure or a heavy processing load). Some participants showed absence or errors of case in the production task, which suggests that their poor performance could come from a deficit in knowledge of case or from a mapping problem between a Case feature and case morphology. Comparisons between the Korean and the English TVJT results revealed a strong subject-interpretation bias in both languages for lower proficiency adult and child L2ers but only in Korean for higher proficiency adult L2ers, which suggests that L2ers do transfer their L1 subject interpretation but can subsequently unlearn it--despite an (ostensible) absence of negative evidence. However, (most of) the high proficiency adult L2ers still showed (below) chance performance in the error-inducing conditions, which suggests that non-grammatical factors can conceal knowledge of the English TC that some of them actually have.The two studies show that p...

Learnability in the acquisition of the English tough construction by L1-Korean adult and child L2 learners

“…We would like to thank Kamil Deen, Theres Gru ¨ter, William O'Grady, Homin Sohn, all our participants, and three anonymous Second Language Research reviewers for their very helpful comments and discussions. Some findings in this study have been reported in K Kim's (2014) unpublished doctoral dissertation. All remaining errors are our own.…”

Crosslinguistic influence in bilingual morphosyntactic processing: Effects of language-common, language-contrasting, and language-specific information

“…Previous research shows that this increased complexity can pose greater challenges for child speakers compared to NQ-NP agreement in canonical sentences (e.g., Suzuki & Yoshinaga, 2013). In particular, the scrambled word order in Korean is known to present considerable difficulties for nonnative speakers (e.g., K. Kim, 2014;Song et al, 1997), which may have been the case for our L2 participants.…”

English Speaking Lecturers’ Performances of Communication Strategies and Their Efforts to Improve Students’ Communicative Competence

“…English CC is one aspect of a person's competence that allows him to capture and interpret the meaning and purpose of English communication in certain contexts (Avgousti, 2018;Suvorova et al, 2021). English CC lies in a combination of linguistic competence, sociolinguistic competence, discourse competence, and communication-strategic competence or communication strategies (CSs) (Bataineh et al, 2013;Dossey et al, 2020;Fuller et al, 2018;Kim, 2016;Quasthoff & Wild, 2014).…”