Стаття присвячена питанню, як native speaker реалізує свою владу над non-native speaker. Дослідження виконано в рамках теорії лінгвістичного імперіалізму. Для розкриття цих відносин вводиться концепт права на корегування. Для описання фігур native speaker та non-native speaker звертаємося до дослідників лінгвістичного імперіалізму, зокрема Р. Філліпсона, Ю. Цуди тощо. Вказується, що стандартним поглядом на панування native speaker є соціально-економічний, де native speaker постає як фігура, довкола якої концентруються можливості економічної взаємодії та економічний профіт. Натомість, право на (...) корегування демонструє владу native speaker на комунікативному рівні. Суть права на корегування наступна: native speaker як той, хто первісно занурений у мову і краще розуміє її, має право корегувати/виправляти мову non-native speaker. Для розкриття цього концепту звертаємося до концепту соціолектів Р. Барта та стратегій виключення, описаних Ж. Рансьєром. Основною для права на корегування виступає ідея, що мову найкраще може знати той, хто укорінений у мовне і культурне середовище, звідки походить мова – ця ідея є фігурою системності у розумінні Р. Барта. Право на корегування виконує декілька функцій. По-перше, це практика дискредитації мовлення non-native speaker, маркування його як шуму. По-друге, це практика інтерпеляції та формування non-native speaker як об’єкту мовлення, а native speaker – на Суб’єкта. По-третє, це можливість привласнення мовлення non-native speaker, а отже, позбавлення цього мовлення властивості імперативності, влади. Метою лінгвістичного імперіалізму є створення єдиної (глобальної) логіки виключення non-native speakers з (глобального) комунікативного простору. В цій логіці мова виступає як код, подібний до того коду, що описував Ж. Дельоз. (shrink)

In this note, my aim is to point out a phenomenon that has not received much attention; a phenomenon that, in my opinion, should not be overlooked in the professional practice of philosophy, especially within feminist efforts for social justice. I am referring to the way in which being a non-native speaker of English interacts with the practice of philosophy.1 There is evidence that non-native speakers are often perceived in prejudiced ways. Such prejudiced perception causes harm and, more (...) importantly, constitutes wrongdoing. As in other cases of prejudiced perception and biased behavior, it would be pretentious and misguided to expect philosophers and the philosophy profession to be free from this vice. There are good reasons to think that this prejudiced perception is bad not only for the persons who are perceived in such a way, but also for the profession, for it might make us miss important things that could improve philosophy in general. I claim we should be more sensitive to this phenomenon, both out of concern for justice, and for the sake of doing better philosophy. (shrink)

Previous work on individual differences has revealed limitations in the ability of existing measures (e.g., working memory) to predict language processing. Recent evidence suggests that an individual's sensitivity to detect the statistical regularities present in language (i.e., “chunk sensitivity”) may significantly modulate online sentence processing. We investigated whether individual chunk sensitivity predicted the online processing of gender cues, a core linguistic feature of Spanish. In a self‐paced reading task, we examined native speakers’ processing of relative clauses in which gender (...) cues were variably exploited to induce processing costs. Even after considering the effect of working memory and cognitive control, the results revealed a significant effect of chunking ability in modulating online sentence processing. Critically, higher‐chunking ability speakers’ reading times showed online sensitivity to core linguistic cues online; while low‐chunking ability readers showed no sensitivity to manipulations, indicating shallow real‐time processing of their native language. (shrink)

Is native speaker variation in understanding complex sentences due to individual differences in working memory capacity or in syntactic competence? The answer to this question has very important consequences for both theoretical and applied concerns in linguistics and education. This book is distinctive in giving an historical and interdisciplinary perspective on the rule- based and experience-based debate and in supporting an integrated account. In the study reported here, variation was found to be due to differences in syntactic competence and (...) the author argues that sentence comprehension is a learned skill, displaying many of the general characteristics of cognitive skills. The book will be stimulating reading for psycholinguists, theoretical linguists, applied linguists and educators. (shrink)

As the demand for English language skills among non-native speakers globally has grown steadily so too has the number of ‘global textbooks’ for ELT aimed at a world market. Concurrently, critical perspectives of the expansion of English have begun to challenge the view that native speaker contexts ‘own’ English. Based on the aforementioned, and on reflective approaches to culture, our objective is to analyze critically the representations of speakers of English as a second or foreign language offered by (...) two global ELT textbooks, to discuss the issues of essentialization and reproduction of stereotypes about the “non-native” speakers of English and their sociocultural characteristics in the constructed image. To achieve this purpose, we apply a methodology based on a sociocognitive approach to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Van Dijk, 2013), the concept of sociocultural knowledge as stated by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), and critical perspectives of culture according to Holliday, Kullman, and Hyde (2004). Our findings indicate that, though the books include ‘non-native’ speakers in an attempt to address multiculturalism, their representation is generic, portraying a reified image of their sociocultural traits and presenting diversity mostly through national labels. (shrink)

Trolley dilemmas have been tested cross-culturally, but only recently have researchers begun to assess the effect of responding to such dilemmas in a foreign language. Previous studies have found a Moral Foreign Language Effect in trolley dilemmas, whereby subjects who respond to these dilemmas in a foreign language, tend to offer more utilitarian responses. The present study seeks to test whether the MFLE holds amongst native speakers of Arabic. Additionally, the present study seeks to test whether the use of (...) visual images has any effect on responses. For such purposes, four groups were compared: 1) participants responding to trolley dilemmas in English without visual images; 2) participants responding to trolley dilemmas in Arabic without visual images; 3) participants responding to trolley dilemmas in English with visual images; 4) participants responding to trolley dilemmas in Arabic with visual images. (shrink)

Sociolinguistic research shows that listeners' expectations of speakers influence their interpretation of the speech, yet this is often ignored in cognitive models of language comprehension. Here, we focus on the case of interactions between native and non-native speakers. Previous literature shows that listeners process the language of non-native speakers in less detail, because they expect them to have lower linguistic competence. We show that processing the language of non-native speakers increases lexical competition and access in general, (...) not only of the non-native speaker's speech, and that this leads to poorer memory of one's own speech during the interaction. We further find that the degree to which people adjust their processing to non-native speakers is related to the degree to which they adjust their speech to them. We discuss implications for cognitive models of language processing and sociolinguistic research on attitudes. (shrink)

The premise of this study is to look at the intergenerational transferal of language and racial trauma of Asian immigrants in general and Korean–American immigrants in particular to a western country, the United States of America. This study investigates trauma from a psychological standpoint, based on Chang-Rae Lee’s novel Native Speaker. In describing a marker of citizenship, the novel’s title also points to who is the native language speaker and who is a native of a country, and (...) why one who is not may be excluded. The Korean immigrants’ vulnerability to the English language and racial differences highlights their status as minority “others,” and they suffer from transgenerational trauma. As a result of transgenerational traumatic effects, Henry has various traumatic side effects such as dysphasia, aphasia, and parasomnia and finally leaves no stone unturned to recuperate from trauma. The Trauma of the Unspeakable theory by Michelle Balaev is used in this article to show how trauma affects people’s minds. (shrink)

The present study investigates linguistic choices and strategy selection of American speakers of English, Russian native speakers, and American L2 learners of Russian in their complaints by exploring the interaction of social factors and gender. The data was elicited through an open-ended discourse completion questionnaire and an assessment questionnaire. The qualitative analysis shows significant differences between genders in the group of Russian speakers. The major finding was that Russian males were more judgmental and direct in their complaints, but they (...) were also more humorous and ironic than Russian females. Fewer differences were observed in the group of American speakers and American L2 learners of Russian. The findings indicate similar gender differences within each group and across groups in terms of strategy selection and the number of words. Some of the differences were statistically significant.The findings of the interlanguage analysis open areas for pedagogical intervention so that L2 learners better understand how to address males and females, as well as which linguistic strategies to use to minimize offense while negotiating a problem in Russian culture. (shrink)

Refusal is considered a face-threatening act, since it contradicts the inviter’s expectations. In the case of Japanese, native speakers are known to prefer to leave sentences unfinished for a conventional indirect refusal. Successful comprehension of this indirect refusal depends on whether the addressee is fully conventionalized to the preference for syntactic unfinishedness so that they can identify the true intention of the refusal. Then, non-native speakers who are not fully accustomed to the convention may be confused by the (...) indirect style. In the present study, we used event-related potentials of electroencephalography in an attempt to differentiate the neural substrates for perceiving unfinished sentences in a conventionalized indirect refusal as an FTA between NS and NNS, in terms of the unfinishedness and indirectness of the critical sentence. In addition, we examined the effects of individual differences in mentalization, or the theory of mind, which refers to the ability to infer the mental states of others. We found several different ERP effects for these refusals between NS and NNS. NNS induced stronger P600 effects for the unfinishedness of the refusal sentences, suggesting their perceived syntactic anomaly. This was not evoked in NS. NNS also revealed the effects of N400 and P300 for the indirectness of refusal sentences, which can be interpreted as their increased processing load for pragmatic processing in the inexperienced contextual flow. We further found that the NNS’s individual mentalizing ability correlates with the effect of N400 mentioned above, indicating that lower mentalizers evoke higher N400 for indirect refusal. NS, on the contrary, did not yield these effects reflecting the increased pragmatic processing load. Instead, they evoked earlier ERPs of early posterior negativity and P200, both of which are known as indices of emotional processing, for finished sentences of refusal than for unfinished ones. We interpreted these effects as a NS’s dispreference for finished sentences to realize an FTA, given that unfinished sentences are considered more polite and more conventionalized in Japanese social encounters. Overall, these findings provide evidence that a syntactic anomaly inherent in a cultural convention as well as individual mentalizing ability plays an important role in understanding an indirect speech act of face-threatening refusal. (shrink)

The article reveals the problems of listening comprehension in a foreign-language audience, in particular, by students who are non-native speakers. The theoretical part is a brief characteristic of listening as a type of speech activity: the content of the term, its internal components – the psychophysiological mechanisms involved, the difficulties associated with them. In the practical part the authors of the article demonstrate exercises from the purposefully developed lesson on the removal of difficulties in the perception of sounding speech (...) in non-native speakers children of middle school age, consisting in the systematic development of mechanisms of listening comprehension. Based on the analysis of the experimental lesson, solutions for systematic and consistent work in the classes within the additional remedial course in the Russian language in order to prevent errors and difficulties, as well as to facilitate the process of listening comprehension are proposed. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to investigate how the subjective impression of English speech would change when pause duration at punctuation marks was varied. Two listening experiments were performed in which written English speech segments were rated on a variety of evaluation items by both native-English speakers and non-native speakers. The ratings were then subjected to factor analysis. In the first experiment, the pauses in three segments were made into the same durations, from 0.075 to 4.8 s. (...) Participants rated the segments on 23 evaluation items on a rating scale from 1 to 10. A varimax rotation after PCA led to two factors that were related to speech style. These two factors could be interpreted as representing speech naturalness and speech rate. Speech segments with a pause duration of 0.6 s received the highest naturalness evaluation, while perceived speech rate decreased as the physical pause duration increased, without any changes in utterance segments. In the second experiment, a full-factorial design of pause durations within and between sentences, i.e., for commas and for periods, was implemented in two speech segments. The original speech segments and speech segments without any pauses were also included as control conditions. From ratings on 12 evaluation items, similar to Experiment 1, two factors representing speech naturalness and speech rate were obtained. The results showed again that the perceived speech rate decreased with an increase only in pause duration. As for speech naturalness, the highest evaluations occurred when pause durations were 0.6 s within sentences, and either 0.6 or 1.2 s between sentences. This recommends fixing all pause durations to 0.6 s as a practical way to train non-native speakers to make their spoken English appear more natural. (shrink)

This article demonstrates the ‘patterning’ of the ways discourse markers such as okay, right and yeah are used in academic lectures by native speaker lecturers. It presents an analysis of a) what the lecturers thought they would say and b) what they actually say in comparison to what the lecturers actually do say. In other words, it focuses on the differences between expectations of what would be said and speech, that is, what is actually said.The data comprise verbatim lecture (...) transcriptions of four native speaker lecturers of different disciplines, analysed using a discourse analytical approach. The findings and discussions exhibit the reasons for the differences between the ‘anticipated’ and ‘real’ meanings of the use of these discourse markers.They also reflect upon the significance of non-verbal features in determining the actual functions of these markers. In short, this article highlights the reality use of okay, right and yeah as interactive conversational markers in academic lectures. (shrink)

The present “visual world” eye-tracking study examined the time-course of how native and non-native speakers keep track of implied object-state representations during real-time language processing. Fifty-two native speakers of English and 46 non-native speakers with advanced English proficiency joined this study. They heard short stories describing a target object either having undergone a substantial change-of-state or a minimal change-of-state while their eye movements toward competing object-states and two unrelated distractors were tracked. We found that both groups (...) successfully directed their visual attention toward the end-state of the target object that was implied in the linguistic context. However, neither group showed anticipatory eye movements toward the implied object-state when hearing the critical verb. Only native English speakers but not non-native speakers showed a bias in visual attention during the determiner before the noun. Our results suggested that although native and non-native speakers of English largely overlapped in their time-courses of keeping track of object-state representations during real-time language comprehension, non-native speakers showed a short delay in updating the implied object-state representations. (shrink)

This study was a Persian-English comparative translation investigation on the selected poems of Forough- Farrokhzad, an influential contemporary Iranian poet. Two English translations were analyzed: one by a native Persian speaker, Sholeh Wolpé, an Iranian poet and translator, and the other by a non-native Persian speaker, Jascha Kessler, an American poet, writer and translator. The translations were reviewed according to Vinay and Darbelnet’s(1995) model which identifies two general translation strategies: direct and oblique, resembling literal versus free classifications, respectively, (...) along with their supplementary proce- dures in order to investigate the frequency of the application of each procedure by the two translators. After situating every line of the poems in the related categories, the number of times each procedure was em- ployed was examined. The findings indicated that both translators used the oblique strategy more than the direct one. The non-native translator, however, used the oblique strategy considerably more frequently com- pared to the native translator. Finally, new procedures called complementary procedures were proposed by the researchers to be added to Vinay and Darbelnet’s (1995) model in order to fill the gaps in the application of strategies and procedures to the poems of Forough Farrokhzad and probably other poems. (shrink)

Form-focused instruction can help second language learners notice the forms of language, which is conducive to the acquisition of linguistic forms. Two types of FFIs had been proposed, including focus-on-formS and focus-on-form. Previously, studies on FFI in L2 classroom teaching have focused mainly on the influence of two types of FFIs on the L2 acquisition of grammar and vocabulary. The influence of FonFs and FonF on L2 oral production, however, has been addressed less often. The advantages and disadvantages of different (...) teaching methods in FonFs and FonF have not been well investigated. On the basis of Schmidt’s noticing hypothesis, VanPatten’s input processing hypothesis, and Long’s interactive hypothesis, we investigated the effects of teaching goals, teaching steps, and interactive activities in FonFs and FonF on the complexity, accuracy, and fluency of 32 native Korean speakers’ L2 Chinese oral production. We found that FFI significantly improved the performance of L2 Chinese oral production, although different FFIs had different effects on complexity, accuracy, and fluency. FonF and FonFs could improve both complexity and accuracy, whereas FonF also significantly improved fluency, which was not observed in FonFs. Furthermore, we found that the level of L2 proficiency could modulate the interaction between instruction methods and learning outcomes. For low-proficiency learners, FonF was more helpful for the improvement of fluency. For high-proficiency learners, FonFs was more helpful for the improvement of accuracy. These results demonstrated that teachers should pay attention to the interaction between specific teaching conditions with different L2 proficiency and learning outcomes when implementing FFI. The findings of this study have important implications for the design of procedures and interactive activities of L2 spoken Chinese teaching. (shrink)

Resumen: En la actualidad existe amplia evidencia acerca de la variación alofónica del fonema /tʃ/ en el español de Chile asociada a factores socioculturales; sin embargo, estas investigaciones se han focalizado en la población adulta. Considerando lo anterior, la presente investigación tuvo por objetivo analizar la articulación del fonema /tʃ/ en una muestra de 161 niños/as desde los 2,0 a los 3,11 años de edad residentes de la ciudad de Temuco. La muestra fue dividida según edad y NSE. Entre los (...) principales resultados se observó variabilidad entre los grupos analizados según el cruce de las variables edad y NSE. En cuanto a la variación alofónica del fonema /tʃ/ según el NSE, también se evidenció un comportamiento variable entre los grupos analizados. Los resultados de esta investigación concuerdan con las discusiones actuales respecto de la relación entre los procesos evolutivos propios de la adquisición y la emergencia de variaciones de tipo social.: Currently there is a vast evidence on the allophonic variation of the phoneme /tʃ/ in Chilean Spanish, associated to social factors. Nevertheless, these researches focused on adult population. With this consideration, this study aims to analyze the articulation of the /tʃ/ phoneme in a sample of 161 kids, from 2.0 to 3.11 years old who live the city of Temuco. The sample was divided per age and socioeconomic status. Among the main results, a variably between the groups has been observed, crossing the variables age and socioeconomic status. Concerning the allophonic variable of the /tʃ/ phoneme according to the socioeconomic status, there has also been evidenced a variable behavior between the groups. The results of this study are in concordance with the current discussions on the relationship between evolutionary acquisition processes and the emergence of social variations. (shrink)

We argue for a perspective on bilingual heritage speakers as native speakers of both their languages and present results from a large-scale, cross-linguistic study that took such a perspective and approached bilinguals and monolinguals on equal grounds. We targeted comparable language use in bilingual and monolingual speakers, crucially covering broader repertoires than just formal language. A main database was the open-access RUEG corpus, which covers comparable informal vs. formal and spoken vs. written productions by adolescent and adult bilinguals with (...) heritage-Greek, -Russian, and -Turkish in Germany and the United States and with heritage-German in the United States, and matching data from monolinguals in Germany, the United States, Greece, Russia, and Turkey. Our main results lie in three areas. We found non-canonical patterns not only in bilingual, but also in monolingual speakers, including patterns that have so far been considered absent from native grammars, in domains of morphology, syntax, intonation, and pragmatics. We found a degree of lexical and morphosyntactic inter-speaker variability in monolinguals that was sometimes higher than that of bilinguals, further challenging the model of the streamlined native speaker. In majority language use, non-canonical patterns were dominant in spoken and/or informal registers, and this was true for monolinguals and bilinguals. In some cases, bilingual speakers were leading quantitatively. In heritage settings where the language was not part of formal schooling, we found tendencies of register leveling, presumably due to the fact that speakers had limited access to formal registers of the heritage language. Our findings thus indicate possible quantitative differences and different register distributions rather than distinct grammatical patterns in bilingual and monolingual speakers. This supports the integration of heritage speakers into the native-speaker continuum. Approaching heritage speakers from this perspective helps us to better understand the empirical data and can shed light on language variation and change in native grammars. Furthermore, our findings for monolinguals lead us to reconsider the state-of-the art on majority languages, given recurring evidence for non-canonical patterns that deviate from what has been assumed in the literature so far, and might have been attributed to bilingualism had we not included informal and spoken registers in monolinguals and bilinguals alike. (shrink)

Infants learn from adults readily and cooperate with them spontaneously, but how do they select culturally appropriate teachers and collaborators? Building on evidence that children demonstrate social preferences for speakers of their native language, Experiment 1 presented 10- month-old infants with videotaped events in which a native and a foreign speaker introduced two different toys. When given a chance to choose between real exemplars of the objects, infants preferentially chose the toy modeled by the native speaker. In (...) Experiment 2, 2.5-year-old children were presented with the same videotaped native and foreign speakers, and played a game in which they could offer an object to one of two individuals. Children reliably gave to the native speaker. Together, the results suggest that infants and young children are selective social learners and cooperators, and that language provides one basis for this selectivity. (shrink)

Resumen Auditores chilenos no entrenados y sin conocimientos del alemán deben identificar dentro de una secuencia de voces en alemán la voz de una mujer alemana que habló previamente en español con un retardo de 2 horas. Los enunciados fueron emitidos por estudiantes alemanas nativas de la Universität Regensburg. Los resultados muestran que los auditores identifican la voz original, pero con imprecisión al otorgarle, dentro de una escala de 1 a 7, el mayor puntaje a la voz objetivo por sobre (...) las demás, pero con un promedio general de 6,1. Esto refuerza la idea de que la evidencia auditiva solo debe tener un valor orientativo. El presente texto se basa en un manuscrito presentado en el congreso INGEACUS 2010 celebrado en Valdivia, Chile.Untrained Chilean auditors and without knowledge of German must identify, within a sequence of German voices, the voice of a German woman who previously spoke in Spanish with a delay of 2 hours. The statements were spoken by native German students from the University of Regensburg. The results show that the auditors identify the original voice, but inaccurately, by giving, within a scale of 1 to 7 the highest score to the target voice above the others, but with an overall average of 6.1. This reinforces the idea that hearing evidence should only have an indicative value. This text is based on a manuscript presented at the 2010 INGEACUS Congress held in Valdivia, Chile. (shrink)

English second language learners often experience difficulties in producing native-like English lexical stress. It is unknown which acoustic correlates, such as fundamental frequency (F0), duration, and intensity, are the most problematic for Chinese dialect speakers. The present study investigated the prosodic transfer effects of first language (L1) regional dialects on the production of English stress contrasts. Native English speakers (N = 20) and Chinese learners (N = 60) with different dialect backgrounds (Beijing, Changsha, and Guangzhou dialects) produced the (...) same stimulus including both trochaic and iambic patterns. Results showed that (a) all participants produced the stressed syllable with greater values of F0, duration, and intensity; (b) Native speakers of English employed an exquisite combination of F0, duration, and intensity, while the dialect groups transfer their native prosody into their production of English lexical stress, resulting in the deviation or abnormality of acoustic cues. Results suggest that L1 native dialect background is considered as a potentially influential factor which may transfer in L2 speech encoding and decoding process. (shrink)

The present study aimed to investigate how native Japanese speakers learning Chinese choose preferred positions for temporal adverbs depending on their level of Chinese proficiency. A naturalness judgment task conducted on native Chinese speakers showed that the most natural position for Chinese temporal adverbs was before the subject and that placement after the locative prepositional phrase was incorrect. The same task applied to native Japanese speakers found the most natural position for Japanese temporal adverbs was also before (...) the subject. Further, when they appear at the beginning of a sentence, they provide the time for the entire sentence. Accordingly, temporal topicalization appears to influence naturalness decisions by both native Chinese and Japanese speakers. A point of difference was that in Japanese, a temporal adverb placed after a locative prepositional phrase was judged to be acceptable. When the same task was given to native Japanese speakers learning Chinese divided into three Chinese proficiency level groups, placement before the subject was the most preferred by the higher Chinese proficiency group. In addition, placement after the locative prepositional phrase was unfavored by them while the same position was frequently selected by the lower level group. As Chinese proficiency increases it appears that the preferred temporal adverb position is before the subject and the placement after the locative prepositional is judged to be unnatural. Thus, a sense of suitable temporal adverb positions in Chinese is influenced by the level of Chinese proficiency of native Japanese speakers. (shrink)

Sighted speakers of different languages vary systematically in how they package and order components of a motion event in speech. These differences influence how semantic elements are organized in gesture, but only when those gestures are produced with speech, not without speech. We ask whether the cross-linguistic similarity in silent gesture is driven by the visuospatial structure of the event. We compared 40 congenitally blind adult native speakers of English or Turkish to 80 sighted adult speakers as they described (...) three-dimensional motion scenes. We found an effect of language on co-speech gesture, not on silent gesture—blind speakers of both languages organized their silent gestures as sighted speakers do. Humans may have a natural semantic organization that they impose on events when conveying them in gesture without language—an organization that relies on neither visuospatial cues nor language structure. (shrink)

What leads humans to divide the social world into groups, preferring their own group and disfavoring others? Experiments with infants and young children suggest these tendencies are based on predispo- sitions that emerge early in life and depend, in part, on natural language. Young infants prefer to look at a person who previously spoke their native language. Older infants preferentially accept toys from native-language speakers, and preschool children preferentially select native-language speakers as friends. Variations in accent are (...) sufficient to evoke these social preferences, which are observed in infants before they produce or comprehend speech and are exhibited by children even when they comprehend the foreign-accented speech. Early-developing preferences for native-language speakers may serve as a foundation for later-developing preferences and conflicts among social groups. (shrink)

Studies of native syntactic processing often target phrase structure violations that do not occur in natural production. In contrast, this study examines how variation in basic word order is processed, looking specifically at structures traditionally labelled as violations but that do occur naturally. We examined Swedish verb-second and verb-third word order processing in adult native Swedish speakers, manipulating sentence-initial adverbials in acceptability judgements, in simultaneously recorded event-related potentials to visually presented sentences and in a written sentence completion task. (...) An initial corpus study showed that the adverbials differ in frequency in fronted position, and although all occur mainly with V2 word order, kanske occurs more frequently with V3 in natural production than both idag and hemma. The experimental results reflected these patterns such that V2 sentences were overall more frequently produced and were deemed more acceptable than V3 sentences. The ERP results consisted of a biphasic N400/P600 response to V3 word order that indicated effects of word retrieval and sentence reanalysis. We also found consistent effects of adverbials. As predicted, V3 was produced more frequently and judged as more acceptable in Kanske sentences than in sentences with the other two adverbials. The ERP analyses showed stronger effects for idag and hemma with V3, especially regarding the P600. The results suggest that the naturally occurring word order ‘violation’, V3 with kanske, is processed differently than V3 with other adverbials where the V2 norm is stronger. Moreover, these patterns are related to individuals’ own production patterns. Overall, the results suggest a more varied native word order processing than previously reported. (shrink)

In this article, we explore whether cross-linguistic differences in grammatical aspect encoding may give rise to differences in memory and cognition. We compared native speakers of two languages that encode aspect differently (English and Swedish) in four tasks that examined verbal descriptions of stimuli, online triads matching, and memory-based triads matching with and without verbal interference. Results showed between-group differences in verbal descriptions and in memory-based triads matching. However, no differences were found in online triads matching and in memory-based (...) triads matching with verbal interference. These findings need to be interpreted in the context of the overall pattern of performance, which indicated that both groups based their similarity judgments on common perceptual characteristics of motion events. These results show for the first time a cross-linguistic difference in memory as a function of differences in grammatical aspect encoding, but they also contribute to the emerging view that language fine tunes rather than shapes perceptual processes that are likely to be universal and unchanging. (shrink)

In an article in Cognition, Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich [Machery et al., 2004] present data which purports to show that “East Asian” native Cantonese speakers tend to have descriptivist intuitions about the referents of proper names, while “Western” native English speakers tend to have causal-historical intuitions about proper names. Machery et al take this finding to support the view that some intuitions, the universality of which they claim is central to philosophical theories, vary according to cultural background. (...) Machery et al hypothesize that the differences in intuitions about reference stem from general psychological differences between Eastern and Western subjects. Machery et al conclude from their findings that the philosophical methodology of consulting intuitions about hypothetical cases is flawed vis ` a vis the goal of determining truths about some philosophical domains. To quote Machery et al, “our data indicate that philosophers must radically revise their methodology” because “the intuitions philosophers pronounce from their armchairs are likely to be a product of their own culture and their academic training” ( [Machery et al., 2004] pp.B9). “The evidence suggests that it is wrong for philosophers to assume a priori the universality of their own semantic intuitions” ( [Machery et al., 2004] pp. B8). In the following study, I present data incompatible with Machery et al’s results. Native Cantonese-speaking immigrants from a Cantonese diaspora 1 in Southern California do not have descriptivist intuitions about the referents of proper names when presented with a Cantonese story and Cantonese questions about reference and truth-value. This data raises questions about the quality of Machery et al’s study and the conclusions they draw from it. (shrink)

The present paper examines the relationship between explicit and implicit memory and ultimate attainment in the native language. Two groups of native speakers of English with different levels of academic attainment (i.e., high vs. low) took part in three language tasks which assessed grammar, vocabulary and collocational knowledge, as well as phonological short-term memory (assessed using a forward digit-span task), explicit associative memory (assessed using a paired-associates task) and implicit memory (assessed using a deterministic serial reaction time task). (...) Results revealed strong relationships between phonological short-term memory and explicit associative memory on the one hand and the three language tasks on the other hand, and no relation between linguistic performance and implicit memory. Taken together, these results cast doubts on the common assumption that L1 grammar learning depends almost entirely on implicit memory and align with the claims of usage-based models of language acquisition that grammatical and lexical knowledge depend on the same cognitive mechanisms. (shrink)

Given the fact that ‘native’ speakers and linguists both can be considered as experts in language, the specificity of their knowledge of language needs to be described. The reflexive discourses they respectively produce seem to indicate a difference in the perception of temporality and in the capacity of acknowledging ignorance. In this respect, the present paper analyzes two kinds of data: Guidelines produced by linguists acting as experts for language analysis in asylum cases, and elicited interviews collected in the (...) field within an anthropological framework. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to find out how people process the dialectal variation encountered in the daily linguistic input. We conducted an eye tracking study (Visual Word Paradigm) that targeted the predictive processing of grammatical gender markers. Three different groups of Norwegian speakers took part in the experiment: one group of students from the capital Oslo, and two groups of dialect speakers from the Western Norwegian town Sogndal. One Sogndal group was defined as ``stable dialect speakers'', and one (...) as ``unstable dialect speakers'', based on a background questionnaire. The students participated in two eye tracking experiments each, one conducted in the their own dialect, and one in the other dialect (i.e., Sogn dialect for the Oslo students, and Oslo dialect for the Sogndal students). The gender systems in the two dialects differ: the Sogn dialect makes an obligatory three-gender split (Masculine, Feminine and Neuter) whereas the Oslo dialect only obligatorily makes a two gender distinction. The research question was whether speakers could use gender markers to predict the upcoming target noun in both local and non-local dialect mode, and furthermore, if they correctly could adjust their expectations based on dialect mode. The results showed that the Sogn speakers could predict upcoming linguistic material both in the local and Oslo dialect, but only the stable group were able to adjust their predictions based on the dialect mode. The unstable group applied a more general Oslo-compatible parsing to both the local and the non-local dialect. The Oslo speakers on the other hand were able to use gender markers as predictors only in their own dialect. We argue that the stable Sogn group should be treated as a bilingual group, as they show native-like skills in both varieties, while the unstable Sogn group can be seen as accommodated monolinguals, in that they treat the two varieties as sharing an underspecified grammar. The Oslo group on the other hand lacks sufficient competence in the other dialect to make use of grammatical markers to make predictions. (shrink)