Eve Zyzik

Second language idiom learning: The effects of lexical knowledge and pedagogical sequencing

This article examines the acquisition of Spanish idioms in a classroom setting that was supplemented with explicit instruction over a 10-week period. The research design manipulated two variables: prior lexical knowledge and idiom organization. Sixty-five second language (L2) learners completed pre- and posttests that measured their ability to recognize and produce the target idioms, as well as a vocabulary test to control for lexical knowledge. Participants in the experimental groups received contextualized idiom presentation that encouraged noticing, retrieving, and generating (Nation, 2001). The results indicate significant treatment effects, although no significant advantage was found for the thematic grouping of idioms. The results also show a significant effect for prior lexical knowledge on one of the dependent variables. These findings are discussed in relation to prior studies of idiom learning from a cognitive linguistics perspective (Boers et al., 2007) as well as psycholinguistic studies that emphasize the salience of literal meanings (Cieślicka, 2006).

Word Class Distinctions in Second Language Acquisition: An Experimental Study of L2 Spanish.

Although the problem of word class has been explored in numerous first language studies, relatively little is known about this process in SLA. The present study measures second language (L2) learners’ knowledge of word class distinctions (e.g., noun vs. adjective) in a variety of syntactic contexts. English-speaking learners of Spanish from third-semester and third-year courses ( N = 240) completed a receptive task that presented contrasting forms belonging to the same word family (e.g., feliz “happy” and felicidad “happiness”). The results indicate that learners from both groups are often unable to distinguish among word classes. In particular, learners have significant difficulty in discriminating between adjectives and nouns. Although ambiguous surface morphology contributes to word class confusions, the results suggest that L2 learners do not always recognize derivational suffixes that clearly mark word class. These difficulties are interpreted as stemming from weak syntactic morphological knowledge as well as incomplete knowledge of L2 distributional regularities.

THE ‘LANGUAGE INSTINCT’ DEBATE: REVISED EDITION

THE ‘LANGUAGE INSTINCT’ DEBATE: REVISED EDITION. Geoffrey Sampson . New York: Continuum, 2005. Pp. xiii + 224.

Null objects in second language acquisition: grammatical vs. performance models

130 cloth,

Epilogue: A Tale of Two Copulas.

39.95 paper. This volume, a revised version of Sampsons (1997) Educating Eve , is an empiricist response to linguistic nativism. Accordingly, the volumess primary objective is to challenge the view that there is an innate component specifically responsible for the human linguistic capacity. This new edition presents insights from corpus linguistics, which are used to refute the original poverty-of-the-stimulus arguments. The introductory chapter gives a historical overview of the nativist doctrine by distinguishing between the original writings of Chomsky and present-day nativists such as Bickerton and Pinker. In this chapter, Sampson also introduces his view of language acquisition as a hypothesis-testing interplay between the learner and the environment, ideas that he attributes to Popper.

Subject expression in L2 Spanish: Convergence of generative and usage-based perspectives?:

Null direct objects provide a favourable testing ground for grammatical and performance models of argument omission. This article examines both types of models in order to determine which gives a more plausible account of the second language data. The data were collected from second language (L2) learners of Spanish by means of four oral production tasks and a grammaticality judgement task. The results reveal that null objects in oral production are rare events limited to pragmatically appropriate contexts, that is, when the referent is easily recoverable from preceding discourse. The results of the grammaticality judgement task indicate that beginning level learners frequently accept sentences containing null objects with specific antecedents, while more proficient learners categorically reject such argument omissions. It is suggested that lower proficiency learners may rely primarily on semantic strategies in parsing and evaluating sentences, while advanced learners are more sensitive to syntactic violations. A performance account is ultimately adopted to explain the data given the lack of a clear null object stage in development, the presence of self-corrections, and the discourse-constrained nature of object omissions.

Incidental Focus on Form in University Spanish Literature Courses

The five papers in this issue cover a range of perspectives on the acquisition and use of the Spanish copulas ser and estar in a variety of contexts, including language contact, bilingual language acquisition, and classroom second language learning. The fact that these papers cite work in this area as far back as the early part of the 20th century with each subsequent decade being represented suggests the continual importance and complexity of the distinction between the two copular forms and shows how this complexity is played out in acquisition and bilingual use. Over the past century different perspectives have been taken on this multifaceted issue with linguistic explanations and the role of the native language being primary. In this epilogue, we focus on some of these same issues, but expand our commentary to include the new dimensions represented in this collection of papers: (i) context of learning (input), (ii) prior knowledge as represented by other language(s) known, (iii) item-learning and lexical development, and (iv) innovations in methodology.

Don Quixote Meets Ser and Estar: Multiple Perspectives on Language Learning in Spanish Literature Classes

The extensive literature on subject expression in Spanish makes for rich comparisons between generative (formal) and usage-based (functional) approaches to language acquisition. This article explores how the problem of subject expression has been conceptualized within each research tradition, as well as unanswered questions that both approaches must consider in order to strengthen and refine their positions. The discussion focuses on convergence between the approaches, which stems from the contemporary interest in the syntax–pragmatics interface and some methodological overlap that results from a joint focus on discourse data.