iReasearch学术科研网

摘要：The focus of this study is the acquisition of grammatical gender in Greek and Dutch by bilingual children whose other language is English. Although grammatical gender languages share the property of noun classification in terms of grammatical gender, there are important differences between the languages under investigation here in terms of both the morphological cues for gender marking available to the child and the developmental path followed by monolingual children. Dutch offers limited input cues for grammatical gender, but Greek shows consistent and regular patterns of morphological gender marking on all members of the nominal paradigm. This difference is associated with the precocious pattern of gender acquisition in Greek and the attested delay in monolingual Dutch development. We explore the development of gender in Dutch and Greek with the aim of disentangling input from age of onset effects in bilingual children who vary in the age of first exposure to Dutch or Greek. Our findings suggest that although bilingual Greek children encounter fewer difficulties in gender acquisition compared to bilingual Dutch children, amount of input constitutes a predictive factor for the pattern attested in both cases. Age of onset effects could be partly responsible for differences between simultaneous and successive bilinguals in Greek, but this is clearly not the case for Dutch. Our findings are also addressed from the more general perspective of the status of 'early' and 'late' phenomena in monolingual acquisition and the advantages of investigating these from the bilingual perspective. Adapted from the source document

摘要：In two eye-tracking experiments we examined whether wider discourse information helps the recognition of reduced pronunciations (e.g., "puter") more than the recognition of canonical pronunciations of spoken words (e.g., "computer"). Dutch participants listened to sentences from a casual speech corpus containing canonical and reduced target words. Target word recognition was assessed by measuring eye fixation proportions to four printed words on a visual display: the target, a "reduced form" competitor, a "canonical form" competitor, and an unrelated distractor. Target sentences were presented in isolation or with a wider discourse context. Experiment 1 revealed that target recognition was facilitated by wider discourse information. It is important that the recognition of reduced forms improved significantly when preceded by strongly rather than by weakly supportive discourse contexts. This was not the case for canonical forms: listeners' target word recognition was not dependent on the degree of supportive context. Experiment 2 showed that the differential context effects in Experiment 1 were not due to an additional amount of speaker information. Thus, these data suggest that in natural settings a strongly supportive discourse context is more important for the recognition of reduced forms than the recognition of canonical forms.

摘要：Often, the classification of words does not go beyond "difficult" (i.e., infrequent, late-learned, nonimageable, etc.) or "easy" (i.e., frequent, early-learned, imageable, etc.) words. In the present study, we used a latent cluster analysis to divide 703 Dutch words with scores for eight word properties into seven clusters of words. Each cluster represents a group of words that share a particular configuration of word properties. This model was empirically validated with three data sets from Grades 2 to 4 children who made either a lexical decision task or a use decision task with a selection of the words. Significant differences were found between the clusters of words within the three data sets. Implications for further study and for practice are discussed.

摘要：The artificial language learning paradigm was used to investigate to what extent the use of prosodic features is universally applicable or specifically language driven in learning an unfamiliar language, and how nonnative prosodic patterns can be learned. Listeners of unrelated languages -- Dutch (n = 100) and Korean (n = 100) -- participated. The words to be learned varied with prosodic cues: no prosody, fundamental frequency (F0) rise in initial and final position, final lengthening, and final lengthening plus F0 rise. Both listener groups performed well above chance level with the final lengthening cue, confirming its crosslinguistic use. As for final F0 rise, however, Dutch listeners did not use it until the second exposure session, whereas Korean listeners used it at initial exposure. Neither group used initial F0 rise. On the basis of these results, F0 and durational cues appear to be universal in the sense that they are used across languages for their universally applicable auditory-perceptual saliency, but how they are used is language specific and constrains the use of available prosodic cues in processing a nonnative language. A discussion on how these findings bear on theories of second language (L2) speech perception and learning is provided. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This study examines the associations between the speaking proficiency of 181 adult learners of Dutch as a second language and their linguistic competences. Performance in eight speaking tasks was rated on a scale of communicative adequacy. After extrapolation of these ratings to the Overall Oral Production scale of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) (Council of Europe, 2001), 80 and 30 participants (on average per speaking task) were found to be, respectively, at the B1 and B2 levels of this scale. The following linguistic competences were tapped with non-communicative tasks: productive vocabulary knowledge, productive knowledge of grammar, speed of lexical retrieval, speed of articulation, speed of sentence building, and pronunciation skills. Discriminant analyses showed that all linguistic competences, except speed of articulation, discriminated participants at the two levels of oral production. Subsequent comparisons showed that the distance between B1ers and B2ers was smaller in knowledge of high-frequency words than in knowledge of medium- and low-frequency words. Extrapolation from scores on the vocabulary test yielded estimations of productive vocabularies of, on average, 4000 and 7000 words for B1ers and B2ers, respectively. The grammar test assessed grammatical knowledge in 10 domains. B2ers were found to outperform B1ers on all parts of the test. Thus, the differences in lexical and grammatical knowledge of B1ers and B2ers appear to be a matter of degree, rather than a matter of category or domain. The paper ends with a research agenda for a linguistic underpinning of the CEFR. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications, Ltd., copyright holder.]

摘要：The goal of this study was to explain individual differences in both native and non-native listening comprehension; 121 native and 113 non-native speakers of Dutch were tested on various linguistic and nonlinguistic cognitive skills thought to underlie listening comprehension. Structural equation modeling was used to identify the predictors of individual differences in listening comprehension and to test for differences between the native and non-native participants. Listening comprehension for native speakers was found to be a function of knowledge of the language and the efficiency with which one can process linguistic information, while listening comprehension for non-native speakers was a function of knowledge and reasoning ability. Working Memory did not explain unique variance in listening comprehension in either group. Differences in experience with the Dutch language are likely to explain the observed pattern of results for both groups. Adapted from the source document

摘要：Many learners of a foreign language (L2) struggle to correctly pronounce newly learned speech sounds, yet many others achieve this with apparent ease. Here we explored how a training study of learning complex consonant clusters at the very onset of L2 acquisition can inform us about L2 learning in general and individual differences in particular. To this end, adult Dutch native speakers were trained on Slovak words with complex consonant clusters (e.g., pstruh/pstrux/"trout", stvrt'/(esh)tvrc/"quarter") using auditory and orthographic input. In the same session following training, participants were tested on a battery of L2 perception and production tasks. The battery of L2 tests was repeated twice more with 1 week between sessions. In the first session, an additional battery of control tests was used to test participants' native language (L1) skills. Overall, in line with some previous research, participants showed only weak learning effects across the L2 perception tasks. However, there were considerable individual differences across all L2 tasks, which remained stable across sessions. Only two participants showed overall high L2 production performance that fell within 2 standard deviations of the mean ratings obtained for an L1 speaker. The mispronunciation detection task was the only perception task which significantly predicted production performance in the final session. We conclude by discussing several recommendations for future L2 learning studies. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This study examined to what extent young second language (L2) learners showed morphological family size effects in L2 word recognition and whether the effects were grade-level related. Turkish-Dutch bilingual children (L2) and Dutch (first language, L1) children from second, fourth, and sixth grade performed a Dutch lexical decision task on words with varying family sizes. The responses of both L1 and L2 children were more accurate (in second grade) and faster (in fourth and sixth grades) for words with a large family than for words with a small family, even though the L2 children had a smaller vocabulary size in Dutch than the L1 children. These findings show how the spreading of semantic activation across languages can influence word recognition in L2 learners. Adapted from the source document

摘要：A classroom study was designed to test the hypothesis that explicit knowledge is used by second-language (L2) learners in a free written response task if that knowledge is present. Eighty-one 12-18-year-old learners of Dutch as an L2 took part in a computer-assisted language learning experiment receiving either explicit or implicit instruction about two grammar structures. The ability to use these structures was measured at three points in time by means of an untimed grammaticality judgment task and a free written response task. Explicit and implicit instruction promoted the use of the target structures in free response tasks equally effectively. However, for one structure, both facilitative and inhibitory effects of explicit instruction were observed if first language similarity was taken into consideration.

摘要：This research investigates children's knowledge of how surface pronunciations of lexical items vary according to their phonological and morphological context. Dutch-learning children aged 2.5 and 3.5 years were tested on voicing neutralization and morphophonological alternations. For instance, voicing does not alternate between the pair [pt]~[ptn] (cap~caps) but does in [bt]~[bdn] (bed~beds). Data from the first experiment showed that children at a younger age were less accurate at imitating words with /d/ than /t/, regardless of morphological context. In a second study, children between 2 and 4 years were asked to produce singulars from novel plurals (e.g., [ktn]~[kt] and [kdn]~[kt]). Results indicated that children's performance was better in contexts that did not require surface variation. Dutch-learning children are not able to robustly generalize their knowledge of phonotactics and morphophonological alternations. Rather, it appears that their knowledge is more concrete, in line with recent usage-based theories of acquisition. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This study investigates the acquisition of verb placement by Moroccan and Turkish second language (L2) learners of Dutch. Elicited production data corroborate earlier findings from L2 German that learners who do not produce auxiliaries do not raise lexical verbs over negation, whereas learners who produce auxiliaries do. Data from elicited imitation and sentence matching support this pattern and show that learners can have grammatical knowledge of auxiliary placement before they can produce auxiliaries. With lexical verbs, they do not show such knowledge. These results present further evidence for the different behavior of auxiliary and lexical verbs in early stages of L2 acquisition. Adapted from the source document

摘要：Deaf children experience difficulties with reading comprehension. These difficulties are not completely explained by their difficulties with the reading of single short words. Whether deaf children and adults lag behind in the morphological processing of longer words is therefore examined in two experiments in which the processing of prefixes by deaf versus hearing children and deaf versus hearing adults is compared. The results show that the deaf children use morphological processing but to a lesser extent than hearing children. No differences appeared between the deaf and hearing adults. Differences between deaf children with and without a cochlear implant were examined, but no firm conclusions could be drawn. The implications of the results for the reading instruction of deaf children are discussed. Adapted from the source document