Ayumi Matsuo

Bilingualism Accentuates Children's Conversational Understanding

Background Although bilingualism is prevalent throughout the world, little is known about the extent to which it influences childrens conversational understanding. Our investigation involved children aged 3–6 years exposed to one or more of four major languages: English, German, Italian, and Japanese. In two experiments, we examined the childrens ability to identify responses to questions as violations of conversational maxims (to be informative and avoid redundancy, to speak the truth, be relevant, and be polite). Principal Findings In Experiment 1, with increasing age, children showed greater sensitivity to maxim violations. Children in Italy who were bilingual in German and Italian (with German as the dominant language L1) significantly outperformed Italian monolinguals. In Experiment 2, children in England who were bilingual in English and Japanese (with English as L1) significantly outperformed Japanese monolinguals in Japan with vocabulary age partialled out. Conclusions As the monolingual and bilingual groups had a similar family SES background (Experiment 1) and similar family cultural identity (Experiment 2), these results point to a specific role for early bilingualism in accentuating childrens developing ability to appreciate effective communicative responses.

Differing Interpretations of Empty Categories in English and Japanese VP Ellipsis Contexts

This article describes how English and Japanese children interpret empty categories in Verb Phrase Ellipsis contexts as in (1): 1. The penguin [sat on his chair] and the robot did Δ, too. To obtain an adultlike interpretation of (1), English children have to do two things. First, they need to find a suitable antecedent for the empty verb phrase labeled with Δ; second, they need to find the antecedent of a pronoun (his, in this case). Finding the correct antecedent of the pronoun depends on the knowledge that English pronouns are ambiguous between referential and bound variable interpretations. It is theoretically debated whether Japanese children have to do the same thing as English children in interpreting the Japanese equivalent of (1) or whether they need to engage in a different operation, such as recovering a noun that consists of a bundle of semantic features (Hoji (1998)). This article reports and interprets results from three groups: 14 English-speaking children, 17 Japanese-speaking children, and 10 Japanese-speaking adults; they participated in an experiment using the Truth Value Judgment Task methodology. The experiment compared 4 different conditions: a strict reading, a sloppy reading, a color mismatch reading, and an object mismatch reading. We discuss the fact that English and Japanese children behave differently in interpreting these empty categories and that Japanese adults and children also behave differently. We consider and discuss what is causing Japanese children to perform differently from adults in the experiment.

NATIVE SPEAKERS' VERSUS L2 LEARNERS' SENSITIVITY TO PARALLELISM IN VP-ELLIPSIS

This article examines sensitivity to structural parallelism in verb phrase ellipsis constructions in English native speakers as well as in three groups of advanced second language (L2) learners. The results of a set of experiments, based on those of Tanenhaus and Carlson ( 1990 ), reveal subtle but reliable differences among the various learner groups. These differences are interpreted as showing that some L2 learners can acquire sensitivity to parallelism in the absence of surface transfer. Furthermore, the results cast doubt on two conventional theoretical claims: that the parallelism effect has a syntactic basis and that it is uniquely linked to instances of surface anaphora (Hankamer & Sag, 1976 ). The research reported here investigates native speakers’ (NSs) and second language (L2) learners’ knowledge of the acceptable use of verb phrase ellipsis (VPE) constructions in English. Specifi cally, we investigate the parallel

Factoring out the parallelism effect in VP-ellipsis: English vs. Dutch contrasts

Previous studies, including Duffield and Matsuo (2001; 2002; 2009), have demonstrated second language learners’ overall sensitivity to a parallelism constraint governing English VP-ellipsis constructions: like native speakers (NS), advanced Dutch, Spanish and Japanese learners of English reliably prefer ellipsis clauses with structurally parallel antecedents over those with non-parallel antecedents. However, these studies also suggest that, in contrast to English native speakers, L2 learners’ sensitivity to parallelism is strongly influenced by other non-syntactic formal factors, such that the constraint applies in a comparatively restricted range of construction-specific contexts. This article reports a set of follow-up experiments — from both computer-based as well as more traditional acceptability judgement tasks — that systematically manipulates these other factors. Convergent results from these tasks confirm a qualitative difference in the judgement patterns of the two groups, as well as important differences between theoreticians’ judgements and those of typical native speakers. We consider the implications of these findings for theories of ultimate attainment in second language acquisition (SLA), as well as for current theoretical accounts of ellipsis.

Young children's understanding of ongoing vs. completion in imperfective and perfective participles

Abstract This article investigates how English-speaking children interpret imperfective and perfective participles used attributively in a prenominal position, as in ‘burning/burned candle’. These participles exhibit a pure aspectual distinction between ongoing and completion that is independent of the temporal entailments contributed by a finite verb. This article reports results from 45 children (1;6–6;8) who participated in an experiment investigating whether they know that the two types of adjectival participles are used to pick out different situations; namely, the imperfective participles map onto ongoing events and the perfective participles map onto completed events (Klein, On times and arguments, 2004). We found that the elimination of the tense-aspect interaction resulted in an improved results compared to those in Wagner (Journal of Child Language 29: 109–125, 2002). However, the results in this article as well as those from Wagners (Journal of Child Language 29: 109–125, 2002) study of grammatical aspect morphology both find that children do not master the aspectual distinction before around age 5 when object-related information is given — in the absence of agency cues.

Processing VP-ellipsis and VP-anaphora with structurally parallel and nonparallel antecedents: An eyetracking study

In this paper, we report on an eye-tracking study investigating the processing of English VP-ellipsis (John took the rubbish out. Fred did [] too) (VPE) and VP-anaphora (John took the rubbish out. Fred did it too) (VPA) constructions, with syntactically parallel versus nonparallel antecedent clauses (e.g., The rubbish was taken out by John. Fred did [] too/Fred did it too). The results show first that VPE involves greater processing costs than VPA overall. Second, although the structural nonparallelism of the antecedent clause elicited a processing cost for both anaphor types, there was a difference in the timing and the strength of this parallelism effect: it was earlier and more fleeting for VPA, as evidenced by regression path times, whereas the effect occurred later with VPE completions, showing up in second and total fixation times measures, and continuing on into the reading of the adjacent text. Taking the observed differences between the processing of the two anaphor types together with other research findings in the literature, we argue that our data support the idea that in the case of VPE, the VP from the antecedent clause necessitates more computation at the elision site before it is linked to its antecedent than is the case for VPA.

Children's Acquisition of Reciprocal Sentences with Stative and Active Predicates.

In this article, I show that children (mean age = 4;4) not only know the meaning and use of complex reciprocal anaphors like each other, but that they also have knowl-edge of subtle differences in the possible interpretations of such anaphors depending on the type of predicates involved. Fiengo and Lasnik (1973) noted a contrast between reciprocal sentences with active predicates ((1)), which are ambiguous, and those with stative predicates ((2)), which are not: (1) The men in the room are hitting each other. (2) The men in the room know each other. Example (1), with an active predicate, has both a strong reciprocal reading (i.e., every one of the men in the room is hitting every other one) and a weak reciprocal reading (e.g., A and B are hitting each other and B and C are hitting each other when four people (A-D) are engaged in the action). On the other hand, (2) with a stative predicate allows only the strong reading (i.e., every one of the men in the room knows every other one). I present results that show that children can distinguish (1) from (2).

Li, P., & Shirai, Y. (2000). The acquisition of lexical and grammatical aspect

THE ACQUISITION OF LEXICAL AND GRAMMATICAL ASPECT. Ping Li and Yasuhiro Shirai . Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2000. Pp. v + 261.

Code-Switching in Japanese Language Classrooms: An Exploratory Investigation of Native vs. Non-Native Speaker Teacher Practice.

106.00 cloth. This book covers everything related to aspect in the field of language acquisition; I was amazed by how the authors managed to do this in such a clear manner in only 261 pages. The book discusses numerous topics related to the acquisition of aspect: from tense to grammatical to lexical aspect, from nativist to functionalist approaches, from a connectionist model to Universal Grammar, and from first language (L1) to second language (L2). It also covers relevant previous research in the acquisition of tense and aspect in Chinese, English, and Japanese. Although the aim of the book is not an extensive survey of the research done on aspect in all possible languages, given the importance of the work done on aspect in Slavic languages, one might have expected to see more discussion of this area.