Cross Linguistic Studies

The designations of the orange fruit in Indo-European languages very often literally meant “apple from China”. Citrus species were known in the Chinese cultural area in the fifth century BCE and glossed in c.100 CE, but there is no basic colour term for orange in Modern Standard Mandarin. This colour category is psychologically salient, but it is still inseparable from a concrete object in the mind of a native speaker, and can therefore be defined as starting to become basic. This article also suggests modification of Berlin and Kay’s (1969: 6) first criterion for basicness in colour terms: applied to Chinese, a term should be monomorphemic and, moreover, monosyllabic – rather than just monolexemic – since almost every syllable is a morpheme in Chinese.

Bilingual language development might be characterized by transfer, deceleration, and/or acceleration, the first two being relevant for the language impairment diagnosis. Studies on bilingual children’s productive phonology show evidence of transfer, but little is known about deceleration in this population. Here, we focused on phonological transfer and deceleration in L1 speech of typically developing Polish-English bilingual children of Polish migrants to the United Kingdom (aged 4.7–7). We analyzed L1 speech samples of 30 bilinguals and 2 groups of Polish monolinguals, matched to the bilinguals on age or vocabulary size. We found that bilingual children’ speech (both simultaneous and early sequential) was characterized by transfer, but not by deceleration, suggesting that while phonological deceleration phases out in children above the age of 4.7, transfer does not. We discuss our findings within the PRIMIR model of bilingual phonological acquisition (Curtin et al., 2011) and show...

The cross-linguistic investigation of semantic categories has a long history, spanning many disciplines and covering many domains. But the extent to which semantic categories are universal or language-specific remains highly controversial. Focusing on the domain of events involving material destruction (“cutting and breaking” events, for short), this study investigates how speakers of different languages implicitly categorize such events through the verbs they use to talk about them. Speakers of 28 typologically, genetically and geographically diverse languages were asked to describe the events shown in a set of videoclips, and the distribution of their verbs across the events was analyzed with multivariate statistics. The results show that there is considerable agreement across languages in the dimensions along which cutting and breaking events are distinguished, although there is variation in the number of categories and the placement of their boundaries. This suggests that there are strong constraints in human event categorization, and that variation is played out within a restricted semantic space.

In his research on bilingualism, Weinreich noticed a process of “interference” between the two languages of the bilingual speaker, marked by deviation from the grammatical norms of either language. Lado referred to this process as a “transfer of forms, meanings and culture” from the native language of the speaker (L1) to his second or foreign language (L2). Corder and Sharwood Smith redefined the notion as a “cross linguistic influence” that included the third and fourth languages of the learner, while Odlin confirmed the notion of transfer with data from empirical evidence.

Research data shows that transfer occurs whenever two or more languages come into contact, and that these influences are effected in two directions: from the native language of the learner(L1) to the second language (L2) as substratum transfer, and from the second language (L2) to the native language (L1) as borrowing transfer. The influence of one language on the other could be positive, facilitating the learning of the lexicon and grammar, or negative, shown in lexical, pragmatic, discourse, or cultural departure from the target language norms. That digression phenomenon could create vagueness, lack of coherence and focus, and lack of relevance in the interlanguage of the learner of the second language. This paper discusses such issues of logicality, ambiguity and relevance in the written English of a native Romanian.

The Chinese provinces are a crazy patchwork quilt of languages and dialects, where the histories of migrations and cultural enclaves, the tides of influence from empire and commerce, the sperm trails that follow rivers and railway lines ... are recorded in a tangle of codes that no one has yet made a serious attempt to untangle. Note that these comments are obviously informal, not a part of systematic research. Chinese scholars themselves are now (2013) taking a much more thorough interest in dialects than was the case even in 2000.

Dall’osservazione dello spazio urbano della città di Roma, effettuato fra gennaio 2011 e giugno 2012, sono stati censiti e documentati 247 graffiti. Ciò che viene presentato in questo saggio è una prima analisi tematica del materiale raccolto. A questa centrale riflessione se ne accompagnano altre incentrate sul contributo che lo studio del graffitismo, osservato e documentato nello spazio urbano e linguistico della capitale italiana, può offrire relativamente a tematiche quali, per esempio, il rapporto diamesico fra lingua scritta e parlata, l’analisi delle varietà giovanili, le interferenze del dialetto e la creazione di neologismi.

Überlegungen zu Funktionsverbgefügen aus sprachvergleichender Sicht Ziel dieses Beitrags ist es, anhand einiger Fälle ‚interlingualer' Funktionsverbgefüge (FVG) im Deutschen, Englischen, Spanischen, Französischen und Italienischen zu zeigen, dass eine sprachübergreifende Behandlung von FVG für Didaktik und Linguistik gleichermaßen von Vorteil sein kann. In diesem Zusammenhang soll auch die Frage nach dem phraseologischen Status von Funktionsverbgefügen mit Blick auf ihre Verortung zwischen Syntax und Lexikon aufgeworfen und unter anderem mit Hilfe konstruktionsgrammatischer Ansätze diskutiert werden. Die Antwort auf diese Frage ist für die sprachvergleichende Perspektive von nicht unerheblichem Interesse. Unter ‚interlingualen' Funktionsverbgefügen werden im Folgenden Funktionsverbgefüge verstanden, die aufgrund lexikalischer und syntaktischer Analogien eine Vergleichbarkeit zwischen verschiedenen Sprachen ermöglichen. Gemeint sind Fälle wie in Betracht ziehen, die sowohl hinsichtlich ihrer syntaktischen Struktur (Präp + Substantiv + Verb bzw. in den anderen Sprachen Verb + Präp + Substantiv) als auch ihrer lexikalischen Substanz (mindestens) des Substantivs (und im Idealfall auch des Verbs) auch in anderen Sprachen in einer analogen Bedeutung existieren: engl. to take into consideration, sp. tomar en consideración, it. prendere in considerazione und frz. prendre en considération.

This paper discusses the history of the acronym A.C.A.B. in the Italian language. It examines the mechanisms that have brought the acronym from the streets to literature and the role of the Skinhead and football Ultras sub-cultures in the language contact between English and Italian.

This book deals with Speech and Language Rhythm and the problems of measuring it. What lies behind Rhythm? Are Speech Rhythm and Language Rhythm (Typology) the same thing? It is theoretically unsatisfactory not to see speech and language as related entities. So, we must assume that what we find in the structure of speech is a(n imperfect) reflection of (an ideal) language structure. Therefore, differences of rhythmic type between languages should be auditorily apparent, quantitatively demonstrable; and if rhythm is part of language, they should be relatable to phonology. Unfortunately, auditory impressions are difficult to communicate, and instrumental measures are notoriously unreliable....What is actually meant by 'rhythm' in different contexts is rarely specified in any precise way, though one may assume that it is primarily an auditory property. However, phonetic studies of rhythm have concentrated on measurable properties, more specifically on durational properties of speech. But, much as we use the word 'rhythm' when talking about measures, we cannot be sure that what we are actually capturing is rhythmically relevant....

The book is devoted to Polish, English and Italian units with animal names as their components. The aim is to compare the units excerpted from mono- and bilingual dictionaries, so that the differences and similarities between the pictures in particular languages could be discussed. The units chosen for the analysis are single-word faunal metaphors and phraseological units with the exclusion of proverbs. The book is composed of three chapters. Chapter one titled Faunal phraseology as the object of contrastive research contains the presentation of basic terms used in Polish, English and Italian studies. Selected contrastive studies on faunal phraseology are also discussed. Chapter two Faunal phraseology in a contrastive perspective: selected theoretical issues contains four subchapters. The first of them is devoted to the imagery of faunal units, while the focal issue of the second is the cultural character of the units analyzed. The symbolic value and evaluative connotations of faunal units are discussed. They are also presented as part of the linguistic picture of the world. In the third subchapter the origins of faunal units are outlined, with the emphasis on the international, national and local character of the units at issue. The last subchapter is devoted to their linguistic features. The third chapter, The picture of a man in faunal phraseology, contains a brief presentation of the description of a man in thematical dictionaries. The anthropocentric character of faunal units is also discussed. The picture of a man reflected in faunal units is composed of several fields. The first of them is the appearance of a man, which covers general description of height and weight as well the description of particular body parts. The evaluation of human appearance is also presented as well as the description of outfit worn by a man. Another field encompasses sensory activities and activities received by human senses. The next field is the one of movement. It encompasses the notions of speed, various kinds of movement, such as jumping, climbing, swimming etc., agility and awkwardness. The physical charateristics of a man constitutes the next field, i.e. age, sleep, strength and weakness, illness, death, eating, addictions, sexual life. Another field, a man perceived as a social being, contains human relations (family, good relations, bad relations), education, business, art and entertainment, crime and situations (poverty / richness, safety / freedom, freedom / captivity). The intelectual potential of a man constitutes the next field, covering stupidity, intelligence, memory and concentration. Two more fields comprise the characteristics of a man (meekness, faithfulness, patience, shyness, cowardice, courage, meanness, generosity, reserve, cleverness, vanity, stubornness) and emotions (love, happiness, anger, fear, shame). The last one, the human world, comprises its selected elements, such as the number / amount, places, weather, colours and time. The conclusion of the analysis is that the majority of fields are covered by faunal units in a similar way in three languages compared, but it should be stressed that significant differences are also observed. Some faunal units convey very specific meanings, not found in faunal lexis and phraseology in the two other languages.

The main objective of this paper is to examine schematic idioms from a cross-linguistic perspective. First, this type of lexical-syntactic structure is discussed in the light of Phraseology (1) and Construction Grammar (2), as well as in a broader theoretical context (3). Then the most important characteristics of schematic idioms are summarized (4) and problems of cross-linguistic comparability are raised from the point of view of Construction Grammar (5). Then the differences between schematic idioms and phraseo-logical models are discussed (6). In particular, the interfaces between schematic idioms and other types of phrasemes are examined (6.1) and an attempt is made to distinguish between phraseological models, structural formulae, and schematic idioms (6.2). Several case studies on (presumably) non-comparable schematic idioms (7.1) and comparable ones (7.2) constitute the empirical core of the paper. These are [Wie ADJ ist DAS denn] and [X kann auch Y] (in 7.1), as well as [S1 PREP S1], [X ist der/die/das neue Y], the Incredulity Response Construction, and the WXDY Construction (in 7.2). Finally, general conclusions are drawn on the subject (8.1), methodological issues are taken into account (8.2), and research wishes are formulated (8.3)

Fixed multi-word units can be focused from a qualitative perspective (according to their morpho-syntactic and semantic features) or from a quantitative one (for example, co-occurrence frequency higher than statistically expected). One can also try to connect both points of view, looking for causal relations between co-occurrence data and the dichotomy idiom principle vs. open choice principle, though the reality of text corpora shows that things are far from being so clear-cut, and that even the difference between phraseological and non phraseological combinations remains an open question, not to mention the number and types of phraseological sub-classes. Specialists from different countries and languages explain and debate their views and research on the presence of phraseology according to the results of modern empirical studies on real spoken and written language.

Analysis of errors produced by Korean learners of English is one area in which much work remains to be done. This paper attempts to delineate two particular types of errors: L1 syntax-influenced errors, those caused by L1 surface structure interference in L2 production, and L1 culturo-syntactically related errors, those caused by L1 surface structure interference which, in turn, has been influenced by cultural or other extralinguistic aspects of the L1 speech community. This culturo-syntactic influence of Korean is shown to occur at the morphological, lexical, phrasal, and sentential levels, all causing errors in English production. Two additional general principles are proposed to account for much of this influence. It is suggested that teacher awareness of these types of errors and imparting to the student information on the reasons causing them will be conducive to their expedient elimination.

This chapter provides an overview of research on the phonetic changes that occur in one's native language (L1) due to recent experience in another language (L2), a phenomenon known as phonetic drift. Through a survey of empirical findings on segmental and suprasegmental acoustic properties, the chapter examines the features of the L1 that are subject to phonetic drift, the cognitive mechanism(s) behind phonetic drift, and the various factors that influence the likelihood of phonetic drift. In short, virtually all aspects of L1 speech are subject to drift, but different aspects do not drift in the same manner, possibly due to multiple routes of L2 influence coexisting at different levels of L1 phonological structure. In addition to the timescale of these changes, the chapter discusses the relationship between phonetic drift and attrition as well as some of the enduring questions in this area.

This study deals with reduplication applying importance to its features of derivational morphology. It provides a semantic and morpho-phonological investigation of the qualities of the types of reduplication phenomena in Modern Turkish. Also, I offer a short introduction on the state of research.

This paper initiates with supplying a basic understanding of what reduplication means, providing its possible types, shapes, and functions typologically. Then, I classify Turkish cross-linguistically, before concentrating on the chief part of my analysis in the penultimate chapter, that is, morpho-semantic reflections on Turkish full and partial reduplication phenomena.

Introduction: The question whether languages differ in their intrinsic tempo is attracting great interest. Is it only an impression that “speakers of some languages seem to rattle away at high speed like machine-guns, while other languages sound rather slow and plodding”? (Roach 1998: 150) Or is there really something in the language structure itself that makes some languages sound faster? And if so: How to measure this “basic” or “intrinsic” tempo of languages, abstracting from the enormous inter-individual and situation dependent variation in speech rate, and from its variation depending on age, gender, education, etc. In Fenk-Oczlon and Fenk (2010) we suggested and applied the simple metric “syllables per intonation unit” in order to analyze and compare languages with respect to their intrinsic tempo, a metric that does without any measuring of duration.

Procedure: Native speakers of 51 languages from all continents (19 European, 32 Non-Indo- European) were asked to translate a matched set of 22 simple declarative sentences encoding one proposition in one intonation unit into their mother tongue. Furthermore, they were asked to count the number of syllables in normal speech. The number of phonemes was determined by the authors, assisted by the native speakers and by grammars of the respective languages.
Results: The 51 languages in our sample show a considerable variation in the mean number of syllables per intonation unit, ranging from 4.64 in Thai up to 10.96 in Telugu. The mean number of syllables per clause is 7.02, and the mean number of phonemes per syllable is 2.24. German shows the highest mean syllable complexity (2.79 phonemes per syllable), followed by Dutch (2.78) and Thai (2.75). The languages with the lowest syllable complexity are Hawaiian (1.76), Japanese (1.88) and Roviana (1.92). A cross-linguistic negative correlation between the number of phonemes per syllable and the number of syllables per clause turned out to be highly significant: – .73 (p < . 01)
Discussion: We view these differences as intrinsic tempo differences between languages: The smaller the syllables of a language, the higher the number of syllables per intonation unit and the higher the intrinsic tempo of that language – similar to music where in “phrases containing many notes, the notes are usually very fast” (Temperley 2001).
The number of syllables per intonation unit or the language intrinsic tempo seems to be, moreover, an important variable underlying the classification of languages as “stress-, syllable-, and mora- timed”. The findings will be related to complexity trade-offs (e.g. Fenk- Oczlon & Fenk 2014) and, more generally, to systemic typology.

Metaphors conceptualizing emotions represent a well researched area within the framework of a cognitive theory of metaphor. However, very few studies focus on emotion metaphors from a discursive and cross-linguistic perspective. The present paper sets out to investigate from a cognitive and discursive point of view conceptual metaphors in the target domain of ANGER in English, French, and Greek. The research is based on comparable corpora written by experts in psychology, psychiatry, and psychotherapy freely available on the Internet. The analysis of the corpora points out that conceptual metaphors are a powerful tool for experts who try to offer their readership a new and scientific perspective on the abstract concept of ANGER, while bringing out both differences and similarities identified in the three subcorpora.

Both language and music are highly ordered systems of communicative expression. Even so, language is by no means merely a structure for encoding, transmitting, and decoding information, and music is much more than a framework for the inscribing, performing , and hearing of sound and rhythm. Through acts of seemingly unbounded artistic creativity, language and music separately stimulate flights of human imagination as few other influences can. Then when combined together in song, language and music uniquely plumb the depths of the soul. It is little wonder that Scripture repeatedly urges God's people to "Sing to the LORD a new song" (Ps 96:1-2, 98:1, 149:1; Isa 42:10). This study examines songwriting from a fresh perspective, that of writing songs in the composer’s second language (in this case, Chinese) without reference to a pre-existing first language edition.

The focal issue of the paper is the stylistic parameter of phraseological units discussed from a cross-linguistic perspective. The aim of the paper is to discuss the stylistic value of fixed expression in terms of interlingual equivalence. The problem will be discussed on the example of selected expressions.

The aim of the paper is to discuss Italian proverbs referring to the inhabitants of places in Italy, e.g. regions, cities, towns etc. with a view to analyzing them in terms of their linguistic characteristics and cultural peculiarities. Many of the units in question are not only carriers of meaning, but also stylistic markedenss, connotations and evaluation. The proverbs constituting the corpus for the analysis are excerpted from the dictionary of proverbs titled Dizionario dei proverbi italiani by Carlo Lapucci (2006) as well as other lexicographic sources. A quantitative and qualitative analysis of the proverbs is conducted, which gives an insight into the linguo-cultural character of the units in question. As culture-bound units, mostly specific to Italian folklore, such proverbs can be considered potentially lacunary in a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective, which means the vast majority of them is likely to have zero equivalents in other languages.

The present study investigated whether orthographic depth can increase the bias towards multi-letter processing in two reading-related skills: visual attention span (VAS) and rapid automatized naming (RAN). VAS (i.e., the number of visual elements that can be processed at once in a multi-element array) was tested with a visual 1-back task and RAN was measured in a serial letter naming task that introduced a novel manipulation (some letter sequences formed frequent words). Spanish-Basque and French-Basque bilingual children were tested at early (30 children in 1st and 2nd grade), and more advanced (24 children in 3rd, 4th and 5th grade) stages of reading acquisition to investigate whether they would be differently biased towards multi-letter processing due to reading in two shallow (Spanish, Basque), or a deep and a shallow (French, Basque) orthography. The French-Basque bilinguals, who read in a deep orthography, were expected to rely on larger orthographic units in reading and thus to be more biased towards multi-letter processing in both tasks. This was expected to be reflected by: (a) a uniform distribution of attention across letter strings in the VAS task, and (b) a greater interference of the embedded words on letter-by-letter naming in RAN, leading to longer naming times. The expected group differences were observed in the more advanced readers, with French-Basque bilinguals showing a wider distribution of VAS across letter strings and longer naming times in RAN. The article can be found at: http://rdcu.be/yvtA

This pilot study aimed at examining how vocabulary knowledge of the language of the text may affect one’s reading comprehension when reading in that language. In order to find out how vocabulary knowledge may affect reading comprehension, a foreign language learner’s reading comprehension performances when reading in a foreign language and in his native language were compared. The findings show that vocabulary knowledge plays a role in reading comprehension performance. Within the context of this study, the participant was lacking in vocabulary knowledge of the target foreign language which deficiency adversely affected his reading comprehension ability in the foreign language. The findings of the study were discussed in relation to the importance of enhancing foreign language vocabulary knowledge for better reading comprehension performance when reading in a foreign language.

NB:  This book is in English.  The full text is downloadable here in pdf. format and begins with an abstract.

Résumé en français: 
Nous avons procédé à l’enregistrement des mouvements de l’œil gauche et  24 lectures orales et silencieuses de contes de Guy de Maupassant et Arthur C. Clarke (1294 et 1516 mots) par des multilingues de haut niveau, les énoncés produits ont été aussi enregistrés. Trois hypothèses portaient sur l’universalité des processus de lecture. La lecture en Anglais et en Français est similaire du point de vue la vitesse de lecture, des erreurs de lecture, et des mouvements oculaires (chapitre 4). La lecture en langue première ou maternelle (L1) est similaire en vitesse, erreurs et mouvements oculaires à la lecture en langue seconde (L2) acquise plus tard (Chapitre 5). La lecture silencieuse était similaire à la lecture à voix haute pour la vitesse et les mouvements oculaires (chapitre 6). Les hypothèses étaient partiellement confirmées ; des implications sont proposées tant pour l’enseignement que pour la recherche.
La lecture silencieuse est significativement plus rapide que la lecture orale, avec une différence moyenne de 28,7%. La vitesse de lecture est similaire en Anglais et en Français, mais elle interagit différemment avec l’expérience du langage : les lecteurs L2 en Anglais lisent 50% plus lentement que les lecteurs L1, tandis qu’en Français, les lecteurs L2 lisent 13% plus vite.
Les scores de re-narration démontrent un léger avantage de compréhension pour la lecture orale par rapport à la lecture silencieuse, une étendue plus large après lecture orale qu’après lecture silencieuse, les lecteurs L1 ayant un léger avantage par rapport aux lecteurs L2, et ils amélioraient leurs scores après une seconde lecture. Interdire la relecture pour améliorer l’exactitude orale pouvait désavantager certains lecteurs : une seconde lecture orale en Anglais (mais pas en Français) induisait plus d’erreurs que la lecture initiale. Ceci exige une nouvelle étude avec des groupes étroitement contrôlés. Globalement, Les lectures en Anglais induisaient 36 % d’erreurs en plus par rapport aux lectures en Français.
Les durées moyennes des fixations étaient un peu plus longues pendant la lecture silencieuse que pendant la lecture à voix haute, et elles présentaient peu de variation entre la lecture en Anglais et en Français. Une part importante de la variation en vitesse de lecture (L1/L2, silencieuse/à voix haute) ne se reflète pas au niveau des durées moyennes des fixations oculaires, même si la dominance langagière présentait un effet en Français, avec des fixations lors de la lecture L1 18.6% plus courtes qu’en lecture L2.
La variation individuelle est un facteur. L’affect émotionnel, le style poétique, la construction syntaxique, et l’attention portée aux métaphores ont aussi été observés ces données EMMA. Une prochaine analyse de cette base de données devrait analyser les relations anaphoriques, les métaphores, la manière dont les textes renseignent, et la manière dont les lecteurs développent des relations narratives, sémantiques et pragmatiques dans un discours textuel complet.

abstract: Phraseological units pose various problems in the process of translation due to their linguistic properties as well as cultural markedness. Interlin-guistic equivalence is a complex notion, used to name various relation between units of language. In a contrastive perspective one can distinguish full equivalents , partial equivalents, phraseological parallels and non-equivalents. The fixed expressions existing only in the source language, i.e. not having phraseo-logical equivalents, constitute phraseological gaps, also called lacunary units. The lack of given source language units in the target language means that they have to be translated non-phraseologically. Their equivalents are either words or loose strings of lexical items; moreover, in some contexts the units may be omitted. The paper deals with the translation of such units, focussing on selected techniques, such as literal translation, substitution, innovation and omission.

This paper analyses the challenges of translating words that express emotion within the context of a selected novel, La festa dei limoni. It argues that there are often multiple possible translatants and thus a criteria for selecting the most accurate word is needed. The first chapter discusses how emotion is expressed through language, exploring different theories of emotion and outlining what exactly is defined as an 'emotion word'. Expressions of emotion are explored across languages, highlighting similarities and differences, along with the implications these have on translation. Chapter two outlines the selected emotion words and demonstrates why exact equivalents cannot be found. The third and final chapter incorporates a language-independent method, NSM, in order to outline the nuances between possible translatants, and thus determining a criteria for when to select one words over another based on the context in which the word occurs.

Emotion scientists often take an ambivalent stance concerning the role of language in a science of emotion. However, it is important for emotion researchers to contemplate some of the consequences of current practices for their theory building. There is a danger of an overreliance on the English language as a transparent window into emotion categories. More consideration has to be given to cross-linguistic comparison in the future so that models of language acquisition and of the language–cognition interface fit better the extant variation found in today’s peoples.

Our national policies designed to inform language and literacy curriculum in the United States continue to reinforce standardized language ideologies that not only fail to meet the needs of non-standardized English speakers but that also place our monolingual speakers at risk. When national policy does not address language ideology in ways that help both monolingual and multilingual speakers to deploy and engage literacy effectively, the U.S. produces citizens whose literacies for effective communication are compromised and the country becomes less competitive in the global arena.

This paper highlights the plight of non-standardized English speakers in the U.S. whose needs have not been met in literacy instruction due to the privileging of Standard American English language ideology in the United States. It demonstrates too how this ideology continues to detrimentally situate linguistically diverse speakers as deficient and in need of fixing, and their monolingual counterparts who lack this diversity as privileged and proficient.

As a way forward, the paper calls for national policy to deviate from a dichotomous approach to multilingualism based on standard monolingual language norms and to instead adopt and advocate for translingual language ideology that bridges the gaps between the monolingual and the multilingual population.

https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/default+domain/8Qe2R546NAKZMcrGPfUD/full

Three experiments examine the syntactic and semantic processing of idioms in English, French, and Tunisian Arabic and compare these processing cross-linguistically with a priming procedure. Results from experiment 1 and 2 reveal that there is a syntactic priming effect of idioms in Tunisian Arabic, French, and English. It is worth noting, however, that it was less significant in English. Experiment 3 concerned with the semantic priming, showing that there is no semantic priming effects as subjects named equally abstract and concrete nouns with no difference in their reaction time. The results from these experiments entail the independence of the syntactic processor, thus, adhering to one central aspect of the modular view of language processing. This study eventually sustains the universality of parsing.

Learning the intonation of a foreign language entails complex perceptive and productive processes mostly beyond the common awareness level. Its instruction demands a thorough understanding of its prosodic features and the appropriate pedagogical practices and resources. This paper reports the findings from a computer-assisted study of the learning of English intonation by Spanish learners. The purpose of this experiment is twofold: (1) To investigate the effects of a multi-sensory approach on the learners’ awareness of the form and meaning of intonation in speech; and (2) to determine the extent to which this approach would generalise to improvement in the prosodic features of controlled and spontaneous utterances. The study employed a pretest/post-test design with two groups of Spanish learners: an experimental (N = 10) and a control group (N = 10). The learners’ pre- and post-test recordings were acoustically analysed and assessed by four native speakers of English. A final learner-questionnaire followed the training. The results reveal a gain in intonation awareness and significant improvement in the prosodic performance of the experimental group.

This Ph.D. dissertation addresses possible bilingualism effects on speakers’ linguistic processing and representation through a psycholinguistic methodology. Our primary focus is the analysis of how bilingualism can influence bilinguals’ first language (L1), but we also investigate possible phenomena present in the acquisition of a second language (L2)-specific structure. More specifically, the research objectives are (i) to verify whether bilinguals exhibit reduced processing cost to read an L2-specific construction in the L1, (ii) to analyze whether these bilinguals accept this construction in their L1 and (iii) to investigate if bilinguals learn both the licensed and the unlicensed features of this construction in the L2. The participants are highly proficient Brazilian Portuguese (BP)-English bilinguals immersed either in the L1 or in the L2. The target structure is the resultative construction (e.g., Samuel wiped the table clean) and our control structure is the depictive construction (e.g., Samuel ate the salmon raw). Both constructions are grammatical in English, but only the depictive is licensed in BP. Furthermore, we observe how the participants process and perceive some ungrammatical resultative sentences (e.g., Samuel twisted the toy broken) in English. In order to reach the research objectives, we conducted a series of experiments using the Maze Task (MT) and the Acceptability Judgment Task (AJT) paradigms in both BP and English. The results from the experiments in BP indicate that both immersed and non-immersed bilinguals process the adjective in the resultative construction significantly faster than BP monolinguals. However, bilinguals and monolinguals perceived the resultative construction as less acceptable than the depictive construction. These results suggest that bilingualism can exert influence on L1 linguistic processing, but such influence does not result in changes in bilinguals’ overall L1 grammar, at least in regards to the constructions under scrutiny. The data from the experiments in English indicates that bilinguals and monolinguals process the resultative construction as fast as they process the depictive construction. They also show an additional processing cost when reading the ungrammatical resultative sentences. Moreover, bilinguals and monolinguals do not differ significantly from each other in their acceptability judgments of the resultative sentences in English, but bilinguals give significantly higher acceptability ratings to the ungrammatical resultative sentences as compared to monolinguals. These results suggest that bilinguals can learn L2-specific constructions, but they are less sensitive to L2-specific restrictions than monolinguals are. We discuss all these findings in light of different theoretical perspectives, among which we highlight the Multi-Competence, the Multiple-Grammars and the Negative Evidence hypotheses.

In and across languages, there are often multiple compositional roads to the same meaning. We can thus arrive at identical truth conditions in very different fashions. This paper discusses just such a case, namely variation in the lexical inventory of comparative operators: In Russian as well as crosslinguistically, one and the same comparison is arrived at by very different lexical and structural means. More specifically, we argue that genitive-marked synthetic comparatives in Russian provide evidence for the phrasal comparative operator proposed in Kennedy (1997). We also show that this operator doesn’t always have to be interpreted in situ, contrary to the claims in Beck, Hohaus & Tiemann (2012).

Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) are words or expressions that exhibit a restricted distribution to certain negative contexts only. For example, yet is an NPI and must appear in the scope of a negation: Mary has *(not) finished yet. The existence of NPIs such as yet gives rise to a learnability problem for language-acquiring children. How do children know that the appearance of yet, for instance, is ungrammatical without a negation based on language input only? Are children able to detect NPIs’ restricted distribution? And do they make overgeneralization errors?

By investigating the acquisition of three NPIs of different strengths and categories in both corpus and experimental studies (i.e. Dutch hoeven ‘need’, English any and Mandarin Chinese shenme ‘a/some’), these questions are addressed in this book. Results of this cross-linguistic investigation show that children employ a conservative widening learning strategy to acquire NPIs, which enables them to detect NPIs’ limited distributional patterns and also prevents them from making overgeneralization errors.

The exploration to the learnability of the three NPIs moreover provides answers to the question as to why NPIs are restricted to different types of negative contexts. Since different learning paths are attested for the three investigated NPIs, this book concludes that NPIs of different strengths are NPIs due to different reasons, and do not form a homogeneous class. In particular, the Dutch NPI hoeven ‘need’ bears a lexical dependency with an abstract negation NEG; English any must be obligatory exhaustified; and Mandarin shenme ‘a/some’ is referentially deficient.

Reading performance of English children in Grades 1–4 was compared with reading performance of German-, Dutch-, Swedish-, French-, Spanish-, and Finnish-speaking children at the same grade levels. Three different tasks were used: numeral reading, number word reading, and pseudoword reading. The pseudowords shared the letter patterns for onsets and rimes with the number words. The results showed that with the exception of English, pseudowords in the remaining orthographies were read with a high level of accuracy (approaching 90%) by the end of Grade 1. In contrast to accuracy, reading fluency for pseudowords was affected not only by regularity but also by other orthographic differences. The results highlight the need for a revision of English-based characterizations of reading development.

Research has shown tentative support for a “borrowed word effect” of English-based loanwords in Japanese (gairaigo) on written production in English by Japanese learners. This study interrogates a longitudinal learner corpus of argumentative and narrative writing by Japanese learners (NNS) and a corresponding NS corpus. Vocabulary profile analyses revealed: 1) NNS writing showed greater deployment of loanword cognate items than NS writing in both genres. 2) The deployment of loanword cognate items in NNS writing in both genres did not change over time. 3) NS writing showed greater deployment of loanword cognate items in narrative writing than argumentative writing, but NNS genres showed no difference. Keyword analysis and concordances of selected loanword cognate items revealed widespread and consistent patterns of ungrammaticality resembling L1 usage. Findings suggest Japanese writers heavily rely on loanword cognates. While loanword cognates arguably contribute to fluency, findings suggest potential for overreliance and negative transfer.