Job Schepens

Distributions of cognates in Europe as based on Levenshtein distance

Researchers on bilingual processing can benefit from computational tools developed in artificial intelligence. We show that a normalized Levenshtein distance function can efficiently and reliably simulate bilingual orthographic similarity ratings. Orthographic similarity distributions of cognates and non-cognates were identified across pairs of six European languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Dutch. Semantic equivalence was determined using the conceptual structure of a translation database. By using a similarity threshold, large numbers of cognates could be selected that nearly completely included the stimulus materials of experimental studies. The identified numbers of form-similar and identical cognates correlated highly with branch lengths of phylogenetic language family trees, supporting the usefulness of the new measure for cross-language comparison. The normalized Levenshtein distance function can be considered as a new formal model of cross-language orthographic similarity.

Cross-language distributions of high frequency and phonetically similar cognates.

The coinciding form and meaning similarity of cognates, e.g. ‘flamme’ (French), ‘Flamme’ (German), ‘vlam’ (Dutch), meaning ‘flame’ in English, facilitates learning of additional languages. The cross-language frequency and similarity distributions of cognates vary according to evolutionary change and language contact. We compare frequency and orthographic (O), phonetic (P), and semantic similarity of cognates, automatically identified in semi-complete lexicons of six widely spoken languages. Comparisons of P and O similarity reveal inconsistent mappings in language pairs with deep orthographies. The frequency distributions show that cognate frequency is reduced in less closely related language pairs as compared to more closely related languages (e.g., French-English vs. German-English). These frequency and similarity patterns may support a better understanding of cognate processing in natural and experimental settings. The automatically identified cognates are available in the supplementary materials, including the frequency and similarity measurements.

The Gender Gap in Second Language Acquisition: Gender Differences in the Acquisition of Dutch among Immigrants from 88 Countries with 49 Mother Tongues

Gender differences were analyzed across countries of origin and continents, and across mother tongues and language families, using a large-scale database, containing information on 27,119 adult learners of Dutch as a second language. Female learners consistently outperformed male learners in speaking and writing proficiency in Dutch as a second language. This gender gap remained remarkably robust and constant when other learner characteristics were taken into account, such as education, age of arrival, length of residence and hours studying Dutch. For reading and listening skills in Dutch, no gender gap was found. In addition, we found a general gender by education effect for all four language skills in Dutch for speaking, writing, reading, and listening. Female language learners turned out to profit more from higher educational training than male learners do in adult second language acquisition. These findings do not seem to match nurture-oriented explanatory frameworks based for instance on a human capital approach or gender-specific acculturation processes. Rather, they seem to corroborate a nature-based, gene-environment correlational framework in which language proficiency being a genetically-influenced ability interacting with environmental factors such as motivation, orientation, education, and learner strategies that still mediate between endowment and acquiring language proficiency at an adult stage.

Learning Complex Features: A Morphological Account of L2 Learnability

Certain first languages (L1) seem to impede the acquisition of a specific L2 more than other L1s do. This study investigates to what extent different L1s have an impact on the proficiency levelsattainedinL2Dutch(DutchL2learnability).Ourhypothesisisthatthevaryingeffects across the L1s are explainable by morphological similarity patterns between the L1s and L2 Dutch.Correlationalanalysesontypologicallydefinedmorphologicaldifferencesbetween49 L1s and L2 Dutch show that L2 learnability co-varies systematically with similarities in morphologicalfeatures.Weinvestigateasetof28morphologicalfeatures,lookingbothatindividual features and the total set of features. We then divide the differences in features into a class of increasing and a class of decreasing morphological complexity .I t turns out that observed Dutch L2 proficiency correlates more strongly with features based on increasing morphological complexity (r= -.67, p ⟨ .0001) than with features based on decreasing morphological complexity (r= -.45, p ⟨ .005). Degree of similarity matters (r = -.77, p ⟨ .0001), but increasing complexity seems to be the decisive property in establishing L2 learnability. Our findings mayofferabetterunderstandingofL2learnabilityandofthedifferentproficiencylevelsofL2 speakers. L2 learnability and L2 proficiency co-vary in terms of the morphological make-up of the mother tongue and the second language to be learned.

The role of morphological complexity in predicting the learnability of an additional language: The case of La (additional language) Dutch:

Applied linguistics may benefit from a morphological complexity measure to get a better grip on language learning problems and to better understand what kind of typological differences between languages are more important than others in facilitating or impeding adult learning of an additional language. Using speaking proficiency scores of 9,000 adult learners of Dutch as an additional language, we reproduced the findings of the Schepens et al. (2013a) study, using a reduced morphological complexity measure. We wanted to define a reduced measure to reveal which morphological features constitute the really important learning problems. Adult language learners whose first language (L1) has a less complex morphological feature configuration than Dutch turned out to have more learning difficulties in acquiring Dutch the less complex their L1 is in relation to Dutch. The reduced measure contains eight features only. In addition, we found cognitive aging effects that corroborate the construct validity of the morphological measure we used. Generally, adult language learners’ speaking skills in Dutch improve when residing longer in the host country. However, this conclusion is only warranted when their L1 morphological complexity is at least comparable to Dutch morphological complexity. If the morphological complexity of their L1 is lower as compared to Dutch, the effect of length of residence may even reverse and have a negative impact on speaking skills in Dutch. It was observed that the negative effect of age of arrival is mitigated when adult language learners have a command of a second language (L2) with higher morphological complexity. We give morphological information for five additional target languages: Afrikaans, Chinese, English, German, and Spanish.

Acquiring nominal gender by deaf learners and hearing adult second language learners of Dutch

In this paper the acquisition of Dutch gender by deaf Dutch adults and hearing adult Turkish and Moroccan L2 learners of Dutch is discussed. Although, in the Netherlands, gender acquisition has been studied amply in ethnic minority children and adolescents, research with regard to ethnic minority adults and deaf adults is limited. The analysis of gender data was part of a comprehensive investigation of (writing) skills in these groups. The data were collected via a (semi-) spontaneous language task in which learners were invited to compose The Frog Story on the computer. Discovering and acquiring the gender paradigm turned out to be hard for the learner groups we investigated. Singular common nouns in Dutch take the definite determiner de and neuter nouns the definite determiner het. The results showed that in all learner groups most learners over generalized the use of de to neuter nouns. The reverse, the use of het with common nouns, hardly occurred. With respect to gender acquisition no differences were found between the various learner groups. The outcomes suggest that, in the domain of gender, the acquisition process in deaf learners of Dutch is comparable to the process of acquisition in hearing adult L2 learners of Dutch, despite their different learner situations (late L1 vs. late L2) and, in case of the adult L2 learners, their typologically different first languages. The explanation seems to be passing general learning stages, in combination with the disbalance between the effort required to learn a covert nominal gender distinction and the absence of informative or communicative value in using the gender distinction properly. This disbalance seems to lead to stagnation or fossization in early stages, in all learner groups.