Amanda Edmonds

SYNTACTIC AND PROSODIC COMPUTATIONS IN THE RESOLUTION OF RELATIVE CLAUSE ATTACHMENT AMBIGUITY BY ENGLISH-FRENCH LEARNERS

This study investigates the manner in which syntax, prosody, and context interact when secondand fourth-semester college-level EnglishFrench learners process relative clause (RC) attachment to either the first noun phrase (NP1) or the second noun phrase (NP2) in complex nominal expressions such as le secretaire du psychologue qui se promene (au centre ville) “the secretary of the psychologist who takes a walk (downtown).” Learners’ interpretations were affected by the length of the RC, specifically its phonological weight. Effects of intonation contour were found only in a subset of learners. In a response time (RT) experiment that manipulated contexts, fourth-semester learners showed a final bias for NP1 attachment in interpretation but an initial RT bias for NP2 attachment. Second-semester learners also produced a NP2 attachment bias in RTs, but no asymmetry in interpretation was found. We argue that the processing of RC attachment by English-French learners requires a task-specific algorithm that implicates autonomous syntactic and prosodic computations and specific interactions among them.

Conventional Expressions. Investigating Pragmatics and Processing.

Conventional expressions, a subset of multiword units, are the target of the current study, which aims to address questions concerning native and nonnative speakers’ knowledge and processing of a set of such strings. To this end, 13 expressions identified as conventional in the southwest of France were tested in an online contextualized naturalness judgment task, which was administered to 20 French natives, 20 long-stay (i.e., >1 year in the southwest of France) Anglophone nonnative speakers of French, and 20 short-stay (i.e., 4–6 months in the same region) Anglophones. The naturalness judgments provided by the participants revealed that all groups judged the conventional expressions similarly and significantly differently from the matched conditions, which involved grammatical but not conventional strings. The reaction time results suggested that conventional expressions have a mental correlate for both natives and nonnatives, although the processing patterns recorded differed for the two groups. The reaction time results are argued to be most consistent with a pragmatic competence model of conventional expression processing.

Variable future-time reference in French: A comparison of learners in a study-abroad and a foreign-language context

Abstract: This study seeks to advance understanding of second-language (L2) acquisition of future-time reference in French, by comparing the developmental trajectories of learners living in and away from the target-language setting. Study-abroad learners in France (n = 45), foreign-language learners living in the US (n = 37), and native speakers of Hexagonal French (n = 30) participated in this study. They completed a written-contextualized task, a language-proficiency test and a background questionnaire. For each written-contextualized-task item, participants selected from among three responses that differed with respect to the form (inflectional future, periphrastic future, present). Items were designed to test for the influence of three factors on the form selected: presence/absence of a lexical temporal indicator, temporal distance, and (un)certainty. Additionally, two extra-linguistic factors were examined: learning context and proficiency level. The analyses of frequency and the multinomial logistic regressions suggest that, despite developmental similarities between learning contexts, acquisitional paths of study-abroad and foreign-language learners were not identical. Résumé: Cette étude cherche à faire progresser notre compréhension de l’acquisition de la référence temporelle au futur en français langue seconde, en comparant les trajectoires développementales d’apprenants vivant ou non dans le milieu de la langue-cible. Des apprenants participant à un séjour en France (n = 45), d’autres vivant aux États-Unis (n = 37) et des locuteurs natifs du français hexagonal (n = 30) ont participé à la présente étude. Ils ont réalisé une tâche d’écriture contextualisée et un test de compétence linguistique, et répondu à un questionnaire de profil linguistique. Pour chaque item d’écriture contextualisée, les participants devaient choisir parmi trois réponses de forme différente (futur fléchi, futur périphrastique, présent). Les items étaient conçus pour tester l’influence de trois facteurs sur la forme choisie : la présence ou l’absence d’un indicateur temporel lexical, la distance temporelle et la certitude. Nous avons également examiné deux facteurs extralinguistiques : le contexte d’apprentissage et le niveau de compétence. Les analyses de fréquence et de régression multinomiale logistique suggèrent qu’en dépit de développements similaires entre les contextes d’apprentissage, la trajectoire acquisitionnelle des apprenants participant à un échange linguistique et celle des apprenants en contexte américain ne sont pas identiques.