Bert Weltens

Foreign Language Attrition.

Compared to research on language acquisition, research on the maintenance and loss of language skills is a relatively recent development. There is, of course, a longstanding sociolinguistic tradition of research on language shift, but work in the field of attrition really started in the US in the late 1970s (Lambert and Freed 1982). Since then, research on language attrition has grown rapidly in different countries, as is witnessed by special issues devoted to the topic in the journals Applied Psycholinguistics in 1986, ITL-Review of Applied Linguistics in 1989 and Studies in Second Language Acquisition in 1989, as well as by three recent volumes: Weltens, de Bot and van Els (1986), Weltens (1989), and Seliger and Vago (1991).

Lexical Processing in Bilinguals.

In this article data from an auditory lexical decision experiment with English-Dutch bilinguals are compared with data from a similar experiment using visual lexical decision. The aim of the experiments was to investigate three factors that may play a role in lexical processing: level of proficiency in the second language, mode of presentation (visual vs. auditory) and cognate- ness of lexical items. The structure of this article is as follows. In the first part a description is given of current theoretical models of the bilingual lexicon. In the second part we present a summary of an experiment on visual lexical decision (Kerkman, 1984; Kerkman and De Bot, 1989), and in the third part we report on the auditory lexical decision experiment. In the last part these two sets of data are discussed in the light of recent theorizing on the bilingual lexicon.

Visual Feedback of Intonation Ii: Feedback Delay and Quality of Feedback

In two experiments we investigated qualitative aspects of pitch visualizers: feedback delay, i.e. the time-pan between the production of an utterance and the plotting of its fundamental-frequency contour, and the quality of the contours with speech material that differed in intonation pattern and in the number of unvoiced segments. The results showed that feedback delay is not a critical factor when using a pitch visualizer for intonation teaching, but that the nature of the speech material - and probably also the voice quality of the speaker who produces the utterances - does dramatically affect the quality of the visual feedback. Both findings have immediate consequences for the design and the application of pitch visualizers.

Language Attrition Research: An Introduction

The study of language loss—or language attrition—was recognized as a field in 1980, when the University of Pennsylvania hosted the first conference ever on the theme. Most of the contributions to this conference stressed the need for systematic empirical investigation of the phenomenon of language attrition, which everybody seems to know about, but which very few scientists had actually looked into.

Lexical Aspects of Standard Dialect Bilingualism.

Weinreich (1953) distinguished three types of bilingualism: the compound, the coordinate, and the subordinative. In this article, we use his partition to describe the effects of a small typological distance on the organization of the bilingual lexicon. In order to do so, two relatively closely related varieties were used, standard Dutch and the dialect of Maastricht. Subjects had to carry out an auditory lexical decision task using the repetition priming paradigm. Stimuli under investigation were cognates and noncognates. There were two age groups (13 and 17 years old) and two language backgrounds (standard Dutch and Maastricht dialect). The results indicated no differences depending on age. With regard to language background, no interlingual repetition priming was found for the dialect speakers. However, in contrast with earlier findings on visual repetition priming, there were interlingual repetition effects not only for the cognates, but also for the noncognates when the standard speakers were concerned. Therefore, we concluded that, at least in the auditory modality, the dialect speakers in question are coordinate bilinguals and the standard speakers are subordinative bilinguals. Finally, it is shown that Weinreichs model in his pure form leads to unexplainable processes in language acquisition. For that reason, his distinctions are incorporated into the lexico-semantic model of Levelt (1989).

The visualisation of pitch contours: Some aspects of its effectiveness in teaching foreign intonation

Abstract Since 1976 work has been carried out towards the development of a microcomputer-controlled set of equipment for displaying pitch contours of sentences. The aims were to produce a practical set-up in which target sentences recorded on tape and ad-hoc imitations by learners/subjects could be displayed simultaneously on the upper and lower halves of a video monitor, and to test this set-up with two target languages and different groups of learners under different conditions. It was found that, for different groups of learners (Dutch learning English, Turks learning Dutch), subjects receiving audio-visual feedback performed better than those receiving only auditory feedback. No differential learning effects were found for L 2 -proficiency level or age.

Is Dutch just another berber? An investigation into the language preferences of immigrants in the Netherlands

Abstract The paper reports a study of language learning and language attitudes among immigrants to the Netherlands. Questionnaires were obtained from 69 students taking Dutch at the Language Centre of the University of Nijmegen. Eighteen students were later interviewed about their attitudes towards Dutch, English, French and German. No evidence was found that Dutch was in any way threatened by English for this group. The importance which the students attached to English as an international language did not lessen the importance they attached to Dutch for living and working in the Netherlands.