Dr. Sharon Armon-Lotem
Early verbs L2
Early Verbs and Argument Structure in L2
Verbs & nouns in the bilingual mental lexicon
Schelletter, C. (2005) Bilingual Children's Lexical Development: Factors Affecting the
Acquisition of Nouns and Verbs and Their Translation Equivalents. In ISB4: Proceedings
of the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism, ed. James Cohen, Kara T.
McAlister, Kellie Rolstad, and Jeff MacSwan, 2095-2103. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla
Press.
Translation equivalents
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Adult bilinguals - particular groups of words and their translation equivalents
have a closer relationship and are translated faster as a result.
Kroll & Stewart (1994), Kroll & de Groot (1997) and van Hell & de Groot (1998)
- there is an effect of form similarity. Nouns that are similar in sound and spelling
are translated faster in both translation directions.
The conceptual feature model (Kroll & De Groot 1997) - form similar words have
a feature overlap in their conceptual representations in the two languages.
Can the previous findings on form similar nouns be also be extended to
verbs?
A case study
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German/English bilingual girl
Age of 1;11 to 2;8 in German and 2;2 to 2;9 in English.
Three sub-periods: period 1 from 1;11 to 2;3, period 2 from 2;4 to 2;6 and period
3 from 2;7 to 2;9.
Findings
"Figure 1 shows that nouns classed as identical occur as frequently as the other noun
types in the first observation period, although there are few tokens. This changes for the
German context for the remainder of the observation period where nouns that are not
similar become the most frequent noun type. In the English context, identical and formsimilar nouns are more frequent than not similar nouns in the second observation period
but the picture becomes more similar to the German context for the last observation
period."
"Figure 2 shows that the distribution of identical, form similar and not similar verbs
remains similar during the observation period and for both language contexts. The high
proportion of identical verbs was only due to the frequent occurrence of the be verb in
both language contexts".
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Dr. Sharon Armon-Lotem
Early verbs L2
Pathbreaking verbs in the bilingual lexicon
Serratrice, L. (2001) The emergence of verbal morphology and the lead-lag pattern issue
in bilingual acquisition. In Cenoz & Genesee (eds.) Trends in Bilingual Acquisition, 4370
• English-Italian simultaneous bilingual (one parent one language), ages 1;10 - 3;2
twice a month.
• 82 verb types
• 17 with multiple inflections (>3 forms)
• Most of these verbs are pathbreaking verbs (Ninio) - frequent, transitive, generic
(general purpose), semantically light and pragmatically important
Subject Omission
Allen, S. (2006) Language acquisition in inuktitut-english bilinguals. Paper presented at
the Conference on Language Acquisition and Bilingualism: Consequences for a
Multilingual Society, Boston University
• 6 Inuktitut-English bilingual children
• aged 1;8 to 2;11 at onset, taped for one year
• 5 children have two bilingual Inuit parents
• 1 child has English-speaking father and bilingual mother
• naturalistic data collected via videotape
(Allen, Genesee, Fish & Crago 2002)
Contrastive analysis
English
• overt subjects usually required (e.g. John ate the cake.)
• subject omission allowed in imperatives and certain colloquial instances (e.g.
____ Eat the cake!)
Inuktitut
• overt subjects only required for emphasis or disambiguation
• subject omission allowed in all other instances
(Zwanziger, Allen & Genesee 2005)
Predictions
If no crosslinguistic influence
• subject omission rates similar to monolinguals in both languages
If crosslinguistic influence
• subject omission rates different from monolinguals in one or both languages
(Zwanziger, Allen & Genesee 2005)
Findings
No cross linguistic influence
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Dr. Sharon Armon-Lotem
Early verbs L2
Object Omission
Yip, V. and S. Matthews (2005) Dual Input and Learnability: Null Objects in
Cantonese-English Bilingual Children. In ISB4: Proceedings of the 4th International
Symposium on Bilingualism, ed. James Cohen, Kara T. McAlister, Kellie Rolstad, and
Jeff MacSwan, 2421-2431. Somerville,MA: Cascadilla Press.
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Simultaneously bilinguals , Cantonese/English, Longitudinal recordings, ages 1;6
- 3;6.
Roeper (1981, 140) “All subcategorizations are obligatory until positive evidence
shows that they are optional”.
Ingham (1993:109) - Naomi 1;08-1;11, 4.8% (12/251 tokens).
Huang (1999) - Adam 2;05–2;09, 3.5%
Findings
"Quantitatively, the percentage of null objects in Timmy’s first eight recording sessions
(2;04-2;08) ranges from 9.1%-28.6%, a higher range than has been reported in any
monolingual studies. In the subsequent period from 2;09-3;06, the rate drops but remains
consistently above 5%. In the parallel development of Timmy's Cantonese in the same
period (2;04-2;8), the rate of null objects ranges from 12.3%-35.3% and is consistently
above 10% throughout the whole period, remaining between 22.9%-35.8% toward the
end of the recording (3;04-3;06)."
Why? An analysis of null objects.
Mueller (1998:153) - Input ambiguity: transfer may occur when “two different
grammatical hypotheses are compatible with the same surface string.”
(a) the target analysis applicable to adult English, in which the missing object is not
syntactically present, but interpreted semantically as generic:
eat β
[+generic]
(b) the analysis based on Chinese grammar (see examples 22-25), in which the missing
object is syntactically present, coreferential with a null topic and therefore interpreted as
specific:
[TOPIC ]i eat x i
[+specific]
Is there transfer of argument structure?
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Dr. Sharon Armon-Lotem
Early verbs L2
Syntactic Priming
Salamoura, A. & J. Williams (2007) Processing verb argument structure across
languages: Evidence for shared representations in the bilingual lexicon. Applied
Psycholinguistics 28, 627–660
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Adult L2 learners, native Greek-speaking advanced learners of English
The prime fragment was always in Greek (L1) and the target fragment always in
English (L2).
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Levelt, Roelofs, and Meyer (1999) - “Syntactic information associated with words
is represented at the lemma level”.
Syntactic priming - the tendency to reproduce the same syntactic structure in a
different semantic context.
Bock (1986) - participants who listened and repeated a prime sentence with a
particular form, were more likely to describe a target picture with the same rather
than a semantically alternative form
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Will syntactic priming occur from L1 to L2?
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The language-shared hypothesis - equivalent L1 and L2 syntactic structures share
representations in the bilingual mental lexicon.
The language-specific hypothesis - even equivalent L1 and L2 syntactic structures
do not have shared representations.
The language-shared hypothesis predicts cross-language syntactic priming.
What is the nature of syntactic representations in the bilingual lexicon:
information about syntactic structure in general, about constituent order, order of
thematic roles, or a combination of these?
Findings
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All three experiments exhibited cross-language (L1-to-L2) syntactic priming
using an oral sentence completion task.
Experiment 1 obtained cross-language syntactic priming when there was an
overlap of syntactic structure and order of thematic roles between prime and
target. It also showed that the magnitude of priming did not differ when the L1
prime and L2 target verbs were translation equivalents or when they differed.
Experiment 2 showed that cross-language syntactic priming is balanced in that
both PO and DO structures can be primed across languages compared to a
baseline (intransitive) structure. It also demonstrated that constituent order
variants of the same structure did not prime each other.
Experiment 3 in conjunction with those of Experiment 2 showed that crosslanguage syntactic priming is contingent upon the overlap of syntactic structure
and thematic roles between the first postverbal arguments of prime and target
items independently of the overall syntactic structure and thematic roles of the
entire sentence.
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Dr. Sharon Armon-Lotem
Early verbs L2
Grammaticality Judgment
Montrul, S. (2001) First-language-constrained variability in the second-language
acquisition of argument-structure-changing morphology with causative verbs. Second
Language Research 17,2 pp. 144–194
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Adult L2 learners.
English, Spanish and Turkish as second languages by speakers whose native
languages are English, Spanish, Turkish and Japanese
The acquisition of two classes of causative verbs: physical change of state verbs
with agentive subjects (e.g., English break) and psychological change of state
verbs with experiencer objects (e.g., English frighten)
Hypothesis and predictions
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Full Transfer/Full Access Hypothesis (Schwartz and Sprouse 1994; 1996) - the
initial state of L2 acquisition is the full computational system of the L1 grammar,
including all the abstract features but excluding the morphophonological matrices
of lexical and functional items.
If the formal features of a given morpheme are expressed overtly in the L1 but
non-overtly in the L2, L2 learners will have difficulty with zero-morphemes and
will try to find a surrogate L2-specific phonological form on which to map the
formal features of such a lexical item
If a morpheme has no phonological form in the L1 but it does in the L2, L2
learners are likely to assume that such morpheme does not have an overt form in
the L2 either, at least initially.
Findings
Change of state verbs - Transfer from L1 Spanish for inchoative Get
Psych verbs - Transfer from L1 Turkish
Summary
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Translation equivalent are link in adults L2 and in bilingual children (longer for
verbs than for nouns)
Adult L2 - full transfer of argument structure
Simultaneous bilinguals - subject omission is restricted by language, but there is
interference of object omission
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