iReasearch学术科研网

摘要：This article provides experimental evidence for the role of lexically specific representations in the processing of passive sentences and considerable education-related differences in comprehension of the passive construction. The experiment measured response time and decision accuracy of participants with high and low academic attainment using an online task that compared processing and comprehension of active and passive sentences containing verbs strongly associated with the passive and active constructions, as determined by collostructional analysis. As predicted by usage-based accounts, participants' performance was influenced by frequency (both groups processed actives faster than passives; the low academic attainment participants also made significantly more errors on passive sentences) and lexical specificity (i.e., processing of passives was slower with verbs strongly associated with the active). Contra to proposals made by Dbrowska and Street (2006), the results suggest that all participants have verb-specific as well as verb-general representations, but that the latter are not as entrenched in the participants with low academic attainment, resulting in less reliable performance. The results also show no evidence of a speed-accuracy trade-off, making alternative accounts of the results (e.g., those of two-stage processing models, such as Townsend & Bever, 2001) problematic. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This study examines whether adult second language (L2) learners of an ungendered first language (L1) are sensitive to gender congruency (grammatical feature absent in the L1) and noun animacy (semantic feature present in the L1) when processing L2 gender concord and whether L2 proficiency level determines such sensitivity. To address these questions, 63 Spanish monolinguals and 69 beginning and 64 intermediate Anglophone late learners of L2 Spanish completed a moving-window and a grammaticality judgment task with sentences with gender concord and discord with animate and inanimate nouns. The moving-window data reveal longer reading times in sentences with gender discord than concord and in those with animate than inanimate nouns in intermediates and Spanish monolinguals but not in beginners. Similarly, grammaticality judgments show that intermediates are more accurate in sentences with inanimate than animate nouns and are better than beginners in sentences with gender agreement violations. These results suggest that intermediate learners display targetlike patterns that are more qualitatively similar to those of natives than beginners, both in terms of semantic and grammatical features. In addition, these findings indicate that agreement with animate nouns is cognitively more demanding than with inanimate nouns both for intermediates and Spanish monolinguals, in line with lexical and syntactic accounts of gender.

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：Movement appears to be specific to natural-language grammars. Thus, processing moments that reflect the computations of traces -- specifically intermediate traces left by cyclic movement -- signal a parsing mechanism specialized for language. Likewise, constraints on binding in English are unlike binding in formal systems: They seem to reflect computations in a specialized grammatical organization. Hence, binding-theoretic computations mediated by cyclic movement chains in the resolution of anaphors and pronouns during processing can be seen as privileged signatures of this grammatical architecture. Adult second language (L2) learners produced reading time asymmetries that reflect binding-theoretic constraints on the logical form reconstructions of anaphors and pronouns along movement chains in real time. These suggest that the processing of English as a L2 is structurally driven. Adapted from the source document

摘要：In the process of language learning, individuals must acquire different types of linguistic knowledge, such as the sounds of the language (phonemes), how these may be combined to form words (phonotactics), and morphological rules. Early and late bilinguals tend to perform like natives on second language phonological tasks that involve pre-lexical processes (e.g., categorization or identification of isolate phonemes) but their performance decreases when the tasks tap into lexical processes (e.g., accessing to the lexicon storage and selecting the appropriate words). This graded performance across phonological processes is consistent with the processing hierarchy proposed by different models of (native) speech perception. The relation between the first and second languages is further evidenced by the correlation between native and non-native phoneme discrimination of both early and late bilinguals. This correlation provides evidence that individual differences in the command of non-native sounds are caused by a language-specific capability. We propose that the study of second language processes combined with the assessment of individual differences is a relevant field for the understanding of the speech perception architecture. Adapted from the source document

摘要：Although research has consistently shown that a bilingual's two languages interact on multiple levels, it is also well-established that bilinguals can vary considerably in their proficiency in the second language (L2). In this paper we review empirical studies that have examined how differences in L2 proficiency modulate cross-language co-activation and interaction during bilingual lexical processing. We review studies investigating cognate and homograph processing in visual word perception and word production, auditory word perception using the visual world paradigm, and cross-language priming, focusing specifically on how differences in proficiency modulate co-activation during lexical access. We further discuss differences in L2 proficiency in relation to immersion and age of L2 acquisition, how differences in L2 proficiency relate to neurocognitive aspects of cognitive control, and how changes in L2 proficiency relative to L1 proficiency may affect lexical processing. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This study aimed to isolate the effects of the two input activities in Processing Instruction: referential activities, which force learners to focus on a form and its meaning, and affective activities, which contain exemplars of the target form and require learners to process sentence meaning. One hundred and twenty 12-year-old Taiwanese learners of English as a foreign language were assigned to one of four groups: Referential + Affective, Referential only, Affective only, or Control. The treatments were computer-based. Pretests, posttests, and delayed posttests, including a timed grammaticality judgment, a written gap-fill, an oral picture narration, and a short semistructured conversation, measured learning of the-edpast tense verb inflection. Findings suggested that referential activities were responsible for the learning gains observed, that affective activities did not provide additional benefits in terms of learning-ed, and that the gains observed displayed some broadly defined characteristics of explicit knowledge.

摘要：This study explored learners self-generated noticing of L2 input. It is motivated by previous research on input enhancement which suggested that learners are able to notice certain aspects of input on their own without any external means to direct their attention. Drawing on insights that learner-generated noticing is largely mediated by learner-internal factors, this study specifically traced the effects of learners first language (L1), and their current second language (L2) knowledge in generating noticing. Two L1 groups (Japanese and English) with no knowledge of the L2 (Korean) were exposed to written L2 input and probed for their noticing behavior under a "zero knowledge" condition, and a "some knowledge" condition (i.e., after they had been taught some L2 words). Results revealed that under the "zero knowledge" condition, both groups exhibited similar noticing patterns prompted by perceptual input properties. Under the "some knowledge" condition, however, the Japanese group seemed to have noticed more input items and processed them at a deeper level of understanding. Insights gleaned from the study are discussed with avenues for future research.

摘要：The present study adopted a cognitive linguistic framework -- Talmy's (1985, 1991, 2000) typological classification of motion events -- to investigate how second-language (L2) Chinese learners come to express motion events in a targetlike manner. Fifty-five U.S. university students and 20 native speakers of Chinese participated in the study. A controlled composition task and a picture-cued written task were administered to elicit learners' knowledge and degree of mastery of Chinese spatial morphemes, also known as directional complements (DCs). Analysis of learners' interlanguage data shows that the difficulties came from the syntactic complexity of the target DC patterns and from the typological features of Chinese as a serial-verb language. The dual functions of DCs as path satellites and as independent verbs posed considerable difficulty for the learners whose first language (L1), English, encodes path by means of satellites only. Based on the results, a developmental order of mastery of L2 Chinese DCs is proposed. The study illuminates areas of difficulty in adjusting to the L2 thinking-for-speaking patterns (Cadierno, 2004, 2008; Slobin, 1996a) that arise when differences in spatial categorization and in conventionalized ways of path encoding exist between the L1 and L2. Adapted from the source document

摘要：Carers recognize that the linguistic problems associated with Alzheimer's disease (AD) can be detrimental to effective communication, but they are often not sure what they can do to help. This article examines the use of formulaic language in AD, including routines, repetitions, and fillers, through the lens of a model of how cognitive and social priorities shape language learning and use. The model sheds light on the ways in which formulaic language can limit effective communication, but also shows how it can be used to support the declining command of novel language. Carers' tendency to adopt formulaic language in their own interaction is also examined. An agenda for future research is offered to further test the validity of these observations and to explore ways of using formulaic language constructively to support improved communication between carers and AD sufferers. Adapted from the source document

摘要：We report the results from two eye-movement monitoring experiments examining the processing of reflexive pronouns by proficient German-speaking learners of second language (L2) English. Our results show that the nonnative speakers initially tried to link English argument reflexives to a discourse-prominent but structurally inaccessible antecedent, thereby violating binding condition A. Our native speaker controls, in contrast, showed evidence of applying condition A immediately during processing. Together, our findings show that L2 learners' initial focusing on a structurally inaccessible antecedent cannot be due to first language influence and is also independent of whether the inaccessible antecedent c-commands the reflexive. This suggests that unlike native speakers, nonnative speakers of English initially attempt to interpret reflexives through discourse-based coreference assignment rather than syntactic binding. Adapted from the source document

摘要：The current study investigated native English and native Arabic speakers' phonological short-term memory for sequences of consonants and vowels. Phonological short-term memory was assessed in immediate serial recall tasks conducted in Arabic and English for both groups. Participants (n = 39) heard series of six consonant-vowel syllables and wrote down what they recalled. Native speakers of English recalled the vowel series better than consonant series in English and in Arabic, which was not true of native Arabic speakers. An analysis of variance showed that there was an interaction between first language and phoneme type. The results are discussed in light of current research on consonant and vowel processing. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This study reports an activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis of published functional neuroimaging studies of bilingualism. Four parallel meta-analyses were conducted by taking into account the proficiency of participants reported in the studies. The results of the meta-analyses suggest differences in the probabilities of activation patterns between high proficiency and moderate/low proficiency bilinguals. The Talairach coordinates of activation in first language processing were very similar to that of second language processing in the high proficient bilinguals. However, in the low proficient group, the activation clusters were generally smaller and distributed over wider areas in both the hemispheres than the clusters identified in the ALE maps from the high proficient group. These findings draw attention to the importance of language proficiency in bilingual neural representation. Adapted from the source document

摘要：In this study, the influence of plausibility information on the real-time processing of locally ambiguous ("garden path") sentences in a nonnative language is investigated. Using self-paced reading, we examined how advanced Greek-speaking learners of English and native speaker controls read sentences containing temporary subject-object ambiguities, with the ambiguous noun phrase being either semantically plausible or implausible as the direct object of the immediately preceding verb. Besides providing evidence for incremental interpretation in second language processing, our results indicate that the learners were more strongly influenced by plausibility information than the native speaker controls in their on-line processing of the experimental items. For the second language learners an initially plausible direct object interpretation lead to increased reanalysis difficulty in "weak" garden-path sentences where the required reanalysis did not interrupt the current thematic processing domain. No such evidence of on-line recovery was observed, in contrast, for "strong" garden-path sentences that required more substantial revisions of the representation built thus far, suggesting that comprehension breakdown was more likely here. Adapted from the source document

摘要：We compare translations of single words, made by bilingual speakers in a laboratory setting, with contextualized translation choices of the same items, made by professional translators and extracted from parallel language corpora. The translation choices in both cases show moderate convergence, demonstrating that decontextualized translation probabilities partially reflect bilinguals' life experience regarding the conditional distributions of alternative translations. Lexical attributes of the target word differ in their ability to predict translation probability: form similarity is a stronger predictor in decontextualized translation choice, whereas word frequency and semantic salience are stronger predictors for context-embedded translation choice. These findings establish the utility of parallel language corpora as important tools in psycholinguistic investigations of bilingual language processing. Adapted from the source document

摘要：Although lexical proficiency, as a cognitive construct, is poorly understood, it is nevertheless an important element of language proficiency and fluency. This study investigates the potential for computational indices related to lexical features to predict human evaluations of lexical proficiency. This can lead to a greater understanding of the construct of lexical proficiency and the capacity for computational indices to automatically assess lexical proficiency. Adapted from the source document