Victoria A. Murphy

The effect of modality on a grammaticality judgement task

Typical experiments investigating the accessibility and/or role of principles of Universal Grammar (UG) in adult second language acquisition (SLA) use a written grammaticality judgement (GJ) task to infer knowledge of principles of UG. This investigation examined whether subjects would judge sentences differently in the aural modality from the visual. It was hypothesized that subjects in the aural condition would be less accurate and slower at judging sentences than subjects in the visual condition. Four language groups were tested: ESL (English second language), FSL (French second language), L1.E (English first language) and L1.F (French first language). Subjects were assigned to either an aural or a visual condition. The target sentences presented to the subjects were declarative sentences involving embedded questions, as well as ungrammatical wh-questions which violated Subjacency. The presentation times for all sentences were matched across conditions. Accuracy and reaction time to grammaticality judgement were measured. The hypothesis that subjects would be slower and less accurate in the aural condition than the visual one was supported. Furthermore, subjects were less accurate and slower to judge violations of Subjacency than other sentences, in both modalities. The detrimental effects of the auditory task on judgements were most pronounced for the L2 learners. These results are discussed in the context of the informativeness and validity of outcomes derived from GJ tasks, and the ways in which they are presented.

Compounding and the Representation of L2 Inflectional Morphology.

Past research has indicated that L1 acquirers do not include regular plural [-s] inflection within compounds, whereas they do include irregulars. This article reports on further work investigating this issue in L2 acquisition. One hundred adolescent francophone ESL students and 15 adult native-speaker controls were required to generate novel compounds in English. The results indicated that although participants reliably included more irregular noun plurals in compounds than regulars, regular plurals were frequently found. The results are discussed in terms of whether both the dual-mechanism and level-ordering models are relevant in the domain of second language acquisition. The evidence does not unequivocally support either model; rather, the results may be best accounted for with a more associative model of language learning

When answer-phone makes a difference in children's acquisition of English compounds

Over the course of acquiring deverbal compounds like truck driver, English-speaking children pass through a stage when they produce ungrammatical compounds like drive-truck. These errors have been attributed to canonical phrasal ordering (Clark, Hecht & Mulford, 1986). In this study, we compared British and Canadian childrens compound production. Both dialects have the same phrasal ordering but some different lexical items (e.g. answer-phone exists only in British English). If influenced by these lexical differences, British children would produce more ungrammatical Verb-Object (VO) compounds in trying to produce the more complex deverbal (Object-Verb-er) than the Canadian children. 36 British children between the ages of 3;6 and 5;6 and 36 age-matched Canadian children were asked to produce novel compounds (like sun juggler). The British children produced more ungrammatical compounds and fewer grammatical compounds than the Canadian children. We argue that childrens errors in deverbal compounds may be due in part to competing lexical structures.

Direct teaching of vocabulary after listening: is it worth the effort and what method is best?

This paper reports a study comparing the effects of vocabulary instruction on recognition and recall through provision of either an L1 equivalent or an L2 (French) definition. Instruction was in the context of a focus-on-meaning listening activity. The study employed a quasi-experimental design, involving 262 Year 9 learners of French in seven intact classes. Results indicate that brief vocabulary instruction after the listening activity led to more effective recall than a listening-only condition. Gains were found in favour of the L1 equivalent condition over the L2 definition condition for higher and lower proficiency students. Pedagogical implications for this type of lexical focus in the context of a meaning-focused activity are discussed.

Serial order of conditional stimuli as a discriminative cue for Pavlovian conditioning.

The serial order in which events occur can be a signal for different outcomes and therefore might be a determinant of how an animal should respond. In this report, we propose a novel design for studying serial order learning in Pavlovian conditioning. In both Experiments 1a and 1b, hungry rats were trained with successively presented pairs of auditory and visual stimuli (e.g., A --> B) using four different stimuli (A-D). Four orders were paired with food (A --> B, B --> C, C --> D, D --> A) while the reversals were extinguished (B --> A, C --> B, D --> C, A --> D). An analysis of responding from the second element of each pair showed that the rats discriminated trial types that preceded food from those that did not. A replication of the effect using a completely counterbalanced design is described in Experiment 1b. These results suggest that rats can use the serial or temporal order of two sequentially presented non-overlapping elements as the basis for discrimination. Two associative accounts are suggested as possible mechanisms for solving the discrimination.

On the Nature of Morphological Awareness in Japanese-English Bilingual Children: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective.

While morphological awareness has received much attention to date, little is understood about how morphological awareness develops within bilingual children learning typologically different languages. Therefore, we investigated childrens knowledge of inflections and derivations in Japanese and English, and also asked whether morphological awareness in one language predicted morphological awareness in the other. To that end, 24 Japanese learners of L2 English (ESL) and 21 English learners of Japanese as a heritage language (JHL) were recruited and participated in a range of tasks assessing both vocabulary and morphological knowledge. Cross-linguistic contributions of morphological awareness were identified in both directions (Japanese ↔ English), after controlling for age, IQ, and vocabulary knowledge. This bidirectional transfer was, however, identified only in the ESL group. The group-specific and reciprocal transfer observed is discussed in terms of morphological complexities and relative competence in each language. The potential role of different types of L2 instruction in morphological development is also discussed.

Level-ordering does not constrain children's ungrammatical compounds

English-speaking children typically avoid using regular plurals in novel grammatical deverbal compounds as in rat eater but allow irregular plurals as in mice eater (Gordon, 19985). To explain these data, it has been argued that level-ordering model constrains the production of morphologically complex words, including those with which children have had little to no experience. If level-ordering can be supported, children should avoid regular plurals in their ungrammatical deverbal compounds like a breaker-bottle. Seventy-two English-speaking children were included in the present study, 36 from Britain and 36 from Canada. The results showed that 50% of the children who produced ungrammatical compounds included regular plurals in the compounds they produced. Conversely, none of the children who produced grammatical compounds included regular plurals. These results indicate that level-ordering does not constrain childrens production of ungrammatical compounds. These results raise the possibility that level-ordering may not be a valid constraint of childrens compounding in general.

Rats do learn XYX rules

Please cite this article in press as: Mondrago In a study carried out with prelinguistic infants, Marcus et al. (1999) proposed that the XYX sequence-learning paradigm constitutes evidence of abstract rule learning related to language that is exclusive to humans. Hauser et al. (2002b) found that cottontop tamarins, Sanguinus oedipus, were also able to learn the sequence and extract a rule, extending the ability from humans to primates. Murphy et al.’s (2008) experiment 2 showed that rats were also able to discriminate the pattern XYX and to transfer it to novel stimuli. Corballis’s (in press) article argues against these later results and questions the involvement of this type of learning in human language. Corballis claims that our rats, and presumably the argument would extend to human infants and cottontop tamarins, confronted with the same kind of task, may have used a subset of stimuli to solve the rule discrimination. For instance, rats learning that XYX was the reinforced sequence may have matched the identity of the first and last stimulus (X), ignoring the interposed element (Y), and that this would be sufficient to discriminate XYX from YYX or YXX. Corballis’s account is not as parsimonious as he suggests because it requires that the rat not only identify each stimulus but also its order or position in the sequence. Moreover, rats must learn which

The influence of learning a second language in primary school on developing first language literacy skills

This study investigated whether learning a second language (L2) has a facilitative effect on first language (L1) literacy and whether there is an advantage to learning an L2 with transparent grapheme–phoneme correspondences. One hundred fifty Year 3 children were randomly assigned into one of three groups: L2 Italian, L2 French, and control. Children were pretested on measures of English (L1) spelling, reading and phonological processing. The L2 groups then received 15 weeks of L2 instruction in Italian or French, respectively. The L2 groups outperformed the control group on posttest measures of English reading accuracy and different aspects of phonological processing. In addition, there was an advantage for the L2 Italian group as their scores were higher than the L2 French group on English reading accuracy and phonological processing.

The influence of prosodic input in the second language classroom: does it stimulate child acquisition of word order and function words?

This paper reports on an intervention study with young Polish beginners (mean age: 8 years, 3 months) learning English at school. It seeks to identify whether exposure to rhythmic input improves knowledge of word order and function words. The ‘prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis’, relevant in developmental psycholinguistics, provided the theoretical framework for the study. Eighty-seven children were randomly assigned to a treatment group exposed to rhythm-salient input in the form of nursery rhymes, a comparison group exposed to prose input, or a control group with no extra input. Results established that prosody can be an important factor in second language acquisition, as in first language acquisition. Children in the treatment group showed improvement in metalinguistic knowledge of English word order but not of function words. This has implications for teaching methods and classroom materials.