Language Learning最新文献

This longitudinal study examines the effects of a pre-study abroad (SA) pedagogic intervention and subsequent SA experience on second language (L2) Mandarin fluency. It explores two temporal aspects of oral fluency—planning time and speech rate—along with one performance measure, duration of response. Additionally, L2 contact data were included as a supplementary variable in the analysis. The experimental group was assessed at three points: before instruction (T1), after 2 weeks of instruction (T2), and post-SA (T3). A non-instructed control group that participated in the SA period provided baseline data. Both groups demonstrated improved fluency after the SA period, with the experimental group showing superior performance in planning time, speech rate, and duration of response. The greatest reduction in between-group differences occurred at T2 and persisted over time. These findings highlight that combining targeted instruction with exposure is highly effective, with L2 contact strongly correlating with overall fluency gains.

Language acquisition is a process whereby an individual develops a language in interaction with the environment (Tomasello, 2005). Language acquisition research studies this process with the aim of describing, explaining, and predicting it.

In view of the above, a question for this commentary is how the overview of and guidelines for complexity and difficulty presented by Bulté, Housen, and Pallotti (henceforth BHP) contribute to research in language acquisition, specifically in second language acquisition (SLA). I argue that the authors’ greater focus on difficulty leads to an increased contribution of this line of work to the SLA research agenda, but that the concept itself is not helpful.

Moreover, somewhat paradoxically, BHP's ambition to be conceptually clear and to distinguish between constructs necessarily leads to a broadening of their scope, which in turn leads to the need for other clarifications. In fact, what starts out as an overview and guidelines ends up being “a research program” at the end of the paper with the aim of answering “some fundamental questions of SLA research,” a program that could be the beginnings of a new theory of SLA.

The aims of the paper are “primarily to bring conceptual and terminological clarity firstly by proposing a key conceptual and terminological distinction between ‘complexity’ and ‘difficulty’ and, secondly, by discussing how these two constructs relate to ‘development’ and ‘proficiency’”. These laudable aims align well with the authors’ previous work, where, albeit not jointly, they have repeatedly discussed construct definitions, operationalization, and measurement of complexity (e.g., Bulté & Housen, 2012; Pallotti, 2015). The authors take these issues seriously, and it is one of the merits of their work.

Within SLA, language complexity has in the past been conceived of mainly as a dependent variable that, through the development of various metrics, has been used to describe progress in second language (L2) proficiency or performance in, for example, studies on task or modality effects and learning contexts.

BHP now argue that complexity can also contribute to a “property theory” of SLA, a term sometimes used by generativist scholars to characterize the abstract knowledge or the competence of the L2 learner. However, this becomes confusing since BHP are using this term in a very different way from, for example, Gregg (2003), who is quoted in this context. BHP are only concerned with the complexity of “forms” or “units” and “with describing the complexity and difficulty realized in actual texts,” that is, something closer to Saussurian parole than to langue. At this stage and in the absence of reference to any (linguistic) theory, it is difficult to see how this approach can account for “non-trivial aspects of the underlying interlanguage systems.”

The authors’ operationalization of difficult

This study tested whether encouraging prediction enhances prediction in second language (L2) speakers. L2 English speakers listened to English sentences like The woman … will read/buy one of the newspapers while viewing the target (a newspaper) and distractor objects (a rose, a bowl, and a mango) on a screen and clicked on the target as quickly as possible. The target was predictable (read) or unpredictable (buy) from the verb meaning. Participants looked at the target longer and were quicker to move the mouse to it when instructed to predict sentence continuation than when they were merely instructed to comprehend sentences. This result held true both when the target was predictable and unpredictable. Furthermore, only when instructed to predict did the participants make more clicking errors when the target was unpredictable than predictable, which suggested that encouraging prediction can interfere with word recognition accuracy in unpredictable contexts due to reduced cognitive resources or failed predictions.

This study investigated how repeating a video-lecture-based task affects second language (L2) learners’ processing and incidental acquisition of technical vocabulary as well as the relationship between processing and lexical gains. The participants were 75 Chinese learners of L2 English. Thirty participants performed the task once (control group), whereas another 30 participants did the same task three times (repetition group). The two groups then completed unannounced vocabulary posttests. The remaining participants engaged in stimulated recall after performing the task once, twice, or three times. The repetition group made greater gains in vocabulary knowledge than the control group, and the repetition group's visual attention to the target words declined during repeated viewing. The amount of attention to the target words emerged as a predictor of delayed meaning recall, with task repetition decreasing the strength of this relationship. Stimulated-recall participants repeating the task reported increased awareness of specific aspects of the target words.

Because of authentic exposure, study-abroad sojourners are expected to become more proficient in terms of holistic formulaicity (defined as targetlike language use of intensifiers, fillers, multiword sequences, lexical features, verb–argument constructions, pragmatic and discourse features, and so on), use of formulaic sequences, and lexical measures. This study traces the development of these constructs over time in written diary texts of 26 Catalan/Spanish bilingual sojourners in an Anglophone country during study abroad. It adopts a dynamic usage-based perspective, underlining the importance of frequency of exposure and individual variability in developmental trajectories. Generalized additive mixed model analyses, which take individual nonlinear behavior into account, showed significant gains toward holistic formulaicity, but not in use of formulaic sequences nor in lexical complexity measures. We argue that at advanced stages some measures may have reached ceiling, but that sojourners may still progress in becoming more finely attuned to the conventionalized ways of saying things in the speech community.

Our contribution draws on quantitative data from a longitudinal mixed-methods study to uncover different patterns of social contacts of study abroad (SA) students and the relationship of these social contacts with (a) language use, (b) target language development, and (c) contextual variables. Data were obtained by means of online questionnaires pre, during, and post sojourn. English oral proficiency gains were measured using the Oral Proficiency Interview by Computer (OPIc) test before and after the stay. Latent profile analysis yielded four profiles of social contacts, which differed in terms of the degree of integration into the community of locals or international students. Students with distinct profiles differ significantly with respect to language use but not in terms of language gains. Regression analyses indicate that comparable progress in oral proficiency was made by students across profiles of social contacts and also by those in an English as a lingua franca (ELF) context suggesting that different SA context and networking patterns are conducive to second language (L2) gains.

Substantial research suggests that high variability (multitalker) phonetic training helps second language (L2) adults improve differentiation of challenging nonnative speech sounds. Is such training also useful for L2 children? Existing studies have mixed findings and important limitations. We investigate the potential benefits of computerized phonetic training for 50 Dutch 7-year-olds and 39 11-year-olds trained on English vowel contrasts in a 2-week study in a classroom setting. Half received multitalker, and half received single-talker input (i.e., high variability vs. low variability; HV vs. LV), with learning evaluated by a battery of tests. Both groups improved in training; however, 11-year-olds improved more. Moreover, 11-year-olds showed generalization to novel talkers, and 7-year-olds did not, with Bayes factor analyses providing evidence for the null. Generalisation in 11-year-olds was no greater following HV than LV input, with evidence for the null on one of two tasks where generalization was found. Results are discussed in terms of the interplay between age, task demands, and talker variability.

This study investigates whether syntactic unification occurs during online L2 sentence comprehension using time-frequency analysis. We measured the oscillatory power changes in native English speakers and L1-Cantonese L2-English speakers while they were reading well-formed English sentences, syntactically intact nonsense sentences, and random word lists. Additionally, we conducted traditional ERP analyses to test L2 speakers’ sensitivity to NP-internal number (dis)agreement. The results show that low-beta power significantly increased in the L2 group when reading not only well-formed sentences but also nonsense sentences, replicating the pattern found in the L1 group. This suggests that syntactic unification occurs in L2 comprehension as reliably as in L1 comprehension. However, L2 speakers did not show increased positivity for NP-internal number disagreement, indicating that they have not developed native-like sensitivity to this syntactic error. The implications of these time-frequency and ERP data for L2 sentence processing and syntactic development are discussed.