Medial wh-questions in native and non-native spanish: learnability and methodological issues
J. M. Liceras, A. Alba, L. Walsh and P. López-Morelos
University of Ottawa
Using Chomsky’s view of language acquisition and the Minimalist Program, this research seeks to provide a psycholinguistic account of the non-native (L2) acquisition of wh-medial constructions (What do you think who the students like?; Who do you think who the students like?) in the grammars of French and English speakers learning German and Spanish as foreign languages. The presence of these constructions has been attested in the L1 grammars of children acquiring languages where they are not an option in the adult grammar (Thorton 1990; Oiry & Demirdache 2006), as well as in L2 grammars where neither the native nor the target grammar exhibits them (Gutierrez 2005; Schulz 2006; Slavkov 2008). This poses a learnability problem for the researcher, who must determine what type of evidence triggers the production and acceptance of these constructions. There have been competence explanations (i.e. they constitute a default or possible option which is innately available) or processing explanations (i.e. the English grammatical equivalents pose problems either for the parser in general or for working memory in particular). It has also been argued that evidence for these constructions could be provided by abstract morpho-syntactic features or related constructions via transfer from the L2. However, there is no clear-cut evidence favoring one explanation over another, and comparable experimental data gathered from different non-native grammars is not available.
The primary significance of the proposed research resides in addressing the learnability issue of whether universal availability of computational mechanisms, direct input or processing needs constitute the best account for the presence of wh-medial constructions (WH-MQ) in L2 grammars whose learners’ L1s do not exhibit them. To investigate the production, acceptance and processing cost of these instances of long distance dependencies we will use a grammaticality judgments task, an oral production task and an online event-related brain potential (ERP) processing task. In order to address the issue of universal availability versus direct input and processing cost we will compare: (a) the status of WH-MQs, which are possible in German but not in Spanish, to the status of long-distance wh-questions (Who do you think the students like?) which are the preferred or primary option in many natural languages. If direct input plays a role, we should find a clear-cut difference between L2 German and L2 Spanish. However, if the status of these constructions is similar in the two non-native grammars, universal availability or processing costs will have to be called upon.
Here we report on the preliminary results of the grammaticality judgments task that has been administered to a group of French and English learners of Spanish and to a group of native Spanish speakers.
J. M. Liceras, A. Alba, L. Walsh and P. López-Morelos
University of Ottawa
Using Chomsky’s view of language acquisition and the Minimalist Program, this research seeks to provide a psycholinguistic account of the non-native (L2) acquisition of wh-medial constructions (What do you think who the students like?; Who do you think who the students like?) in the grammars of French and English speakers learning German and Spanish as foreign languages. The presence of these constructions has been attested in the L1 grammars of children acquiring languages where they are not an option in the adult grammar (Thorton 1990; Oiry & Demirdache 2006), as well as in L2 grammars where neither the native nor the target grammar exhibits them (Gutierrez 2005; Schulz 2006; Slavkov 2008). This poses a learnability problem for the researcher, who must determine what type of evidence triggers the production and acceptance of these constructions. There have been competence explanations (i.e. they constitute a default or possible option which is innately available) or processing explanations (i.e. the English grammatical equivalents pose problems either for the parser in general or for working memory in particular). It has also been argued that evidence for these constructions could be provided by abstract morpho-syntactic features or related constructions via transfer from the L2. However, there is no clear-cut evidence favoring one explanation over another, and comparable experimental data gathered from different non-native grammars is not available.
The primary significance of the proposed research resides in addressing the learnability issue of whether universal availability of computational mechanisms, direct input or processing needs constitute the best account for the presence of wh-medial constructions (WH-MQ) in L2 grammars whose learners’ L1s do not exhibit them. To investigate the production, acceptance and processing cost of these instances of long distance dependencies we will use a grammaticality judgments task, an oral production task and an online event-related brain potential (ERP) processing task. In order to address the issue of universal availability versus direct input and processing cost we will compare: (a) the status of WH-MQs, which are possible in German but not in Spanish, to the status of long-distance wh-questions (Who do you think the students like?) which are the preferred or primary option in many natural languages. If direct input plays a role, we should find a clear-cut difference between L2 German and L2 Spanish. However, if the status of these constructions is similar in the two non-native grammars, universal availability or processing costs will have to be called upon.
Here we report on the preliminary results of the grammaticality judgments task that has been administered to a group of French and English learners of Spanish and to a group of native Spanish speakers.
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Copula omission in the English grammar of English-Spanish bilinguals: a “transfer” account
A. Alba de la Fuente, University of Ottawa
R. Fernández Fuertes, Universidad de Valladolid
J. M. Liceras, Universidad de Ottawa
The debate on whether the omission of subjects in child language is to be accounted for syntactically (Hyams and Wexler 1993) or is the result of a processing deficit (Valian 1991, Valian and Eisenberg 1996) has been extrapolated to copula omission by Becker (2002, 2004). This author argues that the differences in the use of overt copula be versus null copula be in child English rather than being a product of sentence length are determined by the semantic nature of the predicate as in (1) versus (2).
(1) lady __ on that (Nina, 2;02) (2) this is lady (Naomi, 2;02)
Locative predicates, as the Prepositional Phrase in (1), are aspectual and it is their Aspectual Phrase that provides temporal anchoring to the sentence (Guéron and Hoekstra 1995). This results in the possibility of using null be with these types of predicates. However, Nominal predicates, like the Noun Phrase in (2), are not aspectual and, therefore, copula be must be explicit to ensure temporal anchoring.
As for copula be with adjective predicates as in (3) and (4), these predicates could be considered Locative or Nominal (Stage-Level or Individual-Level, following Carlson 1977 and Schmitt and Miller’s 2007 terminology) depending on the type of adjective and on the context, so that (3) would contain a Locative/Stage-Level predicate, while (4) a Nominal/Individual-Level one. In this case, even though the results were less clear-cut and individual differences occurred both quantitatively and qualitatively, the stage-level predicate (3) versus the individual-level predicate (4) dichotomy parallels the Locative/Nominal one.
(3) I __ hungry (Leo, 2;11) (4) Elmo is blue (Simon, 2;05)
In this paper, we provide an analysis of the copula in the developing English grammar of two English/Spanish simultaneous bilingual children in order to address the following issues: 1) whether a grammar-based or a processing-based approach best accounts for child omissions; 2) whether our data mirror the ones discussed by Becker with respect to the differences between Locative and Stage-level predicates versus Nominal and Individual level predicates; 3) whether the differences and similarities are shaped by the fact that Spanish copula is realized by two lexical items: estar (for cases like those in (1) and (3) above) and ser (for cases like those in (2) and (4) above); in other words, whether interlinguistic influence (Hulk and Müller 2000; Paradis and Navarro 2003) can be found in this specific area of grammar.
We have analyzed longitudinal data from the two bilingual children which cover the same age and MLU counts as in the four children in Becker’s (2004) study. An analysis of our data shows that: (i) a grammatical account is favoured over a processing one when the length of the utterances is measured as a word count; (ii) even though there are some similarities in the overall omission patterns with respect to the Locative/Nominal predicate dichotomy, the results are never significant. In the case of the Stage/Individual-level predicates, our data are even less transparent than the monolingual data: in fact our two children display opposite patterns of omission; and (iii) the lexical transparency of Spanish copula estar seems to play a role in the need to incorporate the inflectional level and, therefore, in the copula omission pattern, since our children’s rate of omission is significantly lower than the rate of omission displayed by Becker’s monolingual children.