The acquisition of “other” “different” “less common ...concall/images/pdf/PS2 - Silvina Montrul.pdf · The Acquisition of “Other” “Different” “Less Common” “Distant”
92
The Acquisition of “Other” “Different” “Less Common” “Distant” Languages: A Critical Need Silvina Montrul Conference on Central Asian Languages and Linguistics (ConCALL) Indiana University, Bloomington, October 7-9, 2016
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo
Languages A Critical Need
Silvina Montrul
Conference on Central Asian Languages and Linguistics (ConCALL) Indiana University Bloomington October 7-9 2016
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
bull Existing theories of language of language acquisition and of psycholinguistics as well as the vast majority of empirical research has been heavily based on the study of English and a few other European languages
Purposes of this Talk 1 To show that the acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo
ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo languages is constrained by the same mechanisms and undergoes the same processes attested in other languages
1 To show how research on these languages contributes
to bull theory building bull expansion of the empirical research base bull pedagogical practices for heritage second and third
language acquisition
Language Acquisition
bull First (L1)nativemonolingual acquisition
bull Second Language (L2) Acquisition
bull Heritage Language Acquisition (early bilingual acquisition)
Relevant terms
Order of acquisition First language (L1) Second language (L2)
Functional dimension Primary language Secondary language
Sociopolitical dimension Majority language Minority language
Language Acquisition
beginning middle end
Initial state Intermediate developmental stages
Endstate or ultimate attainment
6
Universal Grammar General Cognition Other Language(s)
Grammatical restructuring Developmental errors Other language related errors
Native speaker Non-native speaker
7
Types of errors
Developmental errors Errors made by all learners (L1 L2 HLL) common to all L2 learners regardless of the L1 linguistic phenomena that are ungrammatical in BOTH their native and target languages
Transfer errors (L2 acquisition and bilingualism)
traceable to the learnersrsquo L1 or bilingualrsquos other language
8
Developmental Errors
bull overregularization of irregular plurals and past tense forms in English
ndash feets childrens speaked runned bull omission of inflectional morphology
ndash two book she speak yesterday I walk
Other Examples
bull Learners of English and of Spanish omit prepositions in relative clauses and questions (Klein 1993 Perpintildeaacuten 2010) (This is the man I told you)
bull Resumptive pronouns in Swedish relative clauses (Hyltenstam 1984)
bull Word order rules in L1 Turkish learner of German (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1994)
bull Some Japanese learners of English exhibit wh-scope marking (Schultz 2011)
10
Transfer Errors
bull Unlike in L1 acquisition L2 learners make errors due to influence from their native language
bull Especially at earliest stages of development L2 learners impose the structural properties of the L1 onto the L2
bull Speakers of different native languages make different errors in the target language
bull L1 transfer happens at the phonological lexical semantic phonological and syntactic levels
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS
(Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR
Steady State L1 Grammar
ILG2 ILG3 Steady State ILG
L2 INPUT
11
Acquisition of Morphology
bull Children acquiring their L1 learn the inflectional and derivational morphology of their language and reach mastery (90) between the ages of 3 and 6 years old
bull Morphology is not mastered at native speaker levels by L2 learners and heritage speakers
bull Bottleneck Hypothesis (Slabakova 2008)
Derivational morphology
HAS LEXICAL INFORMATION derivations of new words
causative morphemes
transitivizing morphemes
other word-formation morphemes
13
Functional Morphology
bull Interfaces with syntax
bull Carries syntactic information
bull Is the locus of crosslinguistic variation
14
What is in a morpheme Form-meaning mapping Inflectional Morpheme Example plural -s in English Phonological forms s z əz Meaning [+ plural] (more than one) Syntactic distribution attaches to Ns only
Derivational Morpheme Example Causative -DIr in Turkish Phonological forms ır dır uumlr duumlr Meaning [+ logical subject + transitive] Syntactic distribution attaches to transitive and intransitive V
15
The Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere 2009)
bull Formal features include phonological syntactic and semantic features bundled together on the lexical items of every language
bull Languages differ in what features they encode in the various pieces of functional morphology
16
Lardiere (2009) p 173
bull ldquo[a]ssembling the particular lexical items of a second language requires that the learner reconfigure features from the way these are represented in the L1 into new formal configurations on possibly quite different types of lexical items in the L2rdquo
bull Learning lexical items with bundles of features in new configurations appears to be the most important learning task
17
L1 influence in morphology
bull We need to look at morphologically different languages
bull Languages that seem to behave syntactically similarly but have different morphological realizations of a given phenomenon
Transitivity Alternations
Alternating Verbs
(1) a The thief broke the window
b The window broke
Non-alternating Verbs
(2) a Julia cut the branch
b The branch cut
Transitivity Alternations
Unaccusative (3) a The rabbit disappeared b The magician disappeared the rabbit c The magician made the rabbit disappear Unergative (4) a Peter laughed
b The clown laughed Peter
c The clown made Peter laugh
Errors in L1 English (Bowerman 1982)
(5) a Suppletive C 29 Irsquom gonna just fall this on her b Unergatives C 31 Irsquom singing him c Unaccusatives E 37 Irsquom gonna put the washrag and disappear something under the washrag d Periphrastic constructions C 211 I maked him dead on my tricycle E 23 Then I am going to sit on him and made him broken E 23 I donrsquot know O didnrsquot get lsquoem lost (= lose)
Spanish has inchoative morphology
(6) a La mujer cocinoacute la sopa the woman cook-past the soup lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b La sopa se cocinoacute the soup refl-cook-past lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Turkish = Spanish
(7) a Hırsız pencere-ye kır-dı
thief window-acc break-past
lsquoThe thief broke the windowrsquo
b Pencere kır-ıl-dı
window break-pass-past
lsquoThe window brokersquo
Turkish Has Causative Morphology
(8) a Kadın ccedilorba-yı piş-ir-di
woman soup-acc cook-caus-past
lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b Ccedilorba piş-ti
soup cook-past
lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Montrul (2000)
TRIDIRECTIONAL STUDY
L2 English L2 Spanish L2 Turkish bull English NS bull Spanish L1 learners of
English bull Turkish L1 learners of
English
bull Spanish NS bull English L1 learners of
Spanish bull Turkish L1 learners of
Spanish
bull Turkish NS bull English L1 learners of
Turkish bull Spanish L1 learners of
Turkish
SAME METHODOLOGY USED IN THE THREE LANGUAGES
Hypotheses
bull The Full TransferFull Access Hypothesis (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996) states that the ldquoentiretyrdquo of the L1 grammar is the initial state in L2 acquisition
bull Then we should observe no argument structure errors in any of the languages
bull We will observe errors due to morphology eg Spanish and Turkish speakers may have difficulty with zero morphology in English and English speakers may have difficulty with the causative and inchoative morphology of Turkish
Findings
bull L2 learners know that alternating verbs alternate in transitivity and that transitive unaccusative and unergatives do not
bull The L2 learners also accepted transitivity errors with the non-alternating classes in the three languages and regardless of the learnersrsquo L1s
bull Developmental error like in L1 acquisition
L1 influence with derivational morphology
bull Spanish-speaking learners were more accurate with verbs with inchoative morphology in Turkish as L2 than the English speaking learners
bull The Turkish L1 learners were very accurate with Spanish inchoative verbs
bull The English learners in the Turkish study were the least accurate with causative and anticausative morphology
bull The Spanish speaking learners were more accurate than the Turkish learners with causative zero derived forms in English
Case Systems
bull Morphologically overtnon-overt case (Turkish and Hindi vs English)
bull Number of cases (Spanish vs Russian)
bull Nominative-Accusative languages (Korean Japanese Turkish English)
bull Ergative languages (Hindi Basque Inuttitut Diyrbal Mayan languages among others)
Differential Object Marking (DOM)
bull Widespread phenomenon in languages of the world
bull Some direct objects are marked with overt morphology
bull The objects that are marked are more semantically or pragmatically salient than non-marked objects
31
Spanish DOM Animate and specific direct objects are
obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoardquo Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos vio a Lucrecia Marcos saw DOM-Lucrecia Marcos vio el auto Macos saw the car
Romanian DOM
Animate and specific direct objects are obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoperdquo and optionally doubled by an accusative clitic
Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos a văzut pe Lucrecia Marcos cl- saw DOM Lucrecia Marcos văzut casa Macos saw the house
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
simultaneous bilinguals
sequential bilinguals
native speakers
000
000
75
000
000
8333
000
000
10000
000
000
10000
2000
000
10000
3333
3333
10000
5000
3333
10000
5000
5000
10000
7500
5000
10000
8000
6667
10000
9700
6667
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
8571
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
9900
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
0
0
75
0
0
8333
0
0
100
0
0
100
20
0
100
333333333333
3333
100
50
3333
100
50
50
100
75
50
100
80
6667
100
97
6667
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
8571
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
99
100
99
100
99
99
native speakers
sequential bilinguals
simultaneous bilinguals
animate objects (with DOM)
98
67
69
inanimate objects (no DOM)
100
100
98
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
bull Existing theories of language of language acquisition and of psycholinguistics as well as the vast majority of empirical research has been heavily based on the study of English and a few other European languages
Purposes of this Talk 1 To show that the acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo
ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo languages is constrained by the same mechanisms and undergoes the same processes attested in other languages
1 To show how research on these languages contributes
to bull theory building bull expansion of the empirical research base bull pedagogical practices for heritage second and third
language acquisition
Language Acquisition
bull First (L1)nativemonolingual acquisition
bull Second Language (L2) Acquisition
bull Heritage Language Acquisition (early bilingual acquisition)
Relevant terms
Order of acquisition First language (L1) Second language (L2)
Functional dimension Primary language Secondary language
Sociopolitical dimension Majority language Minority language
Language Acquisition
beginning middle end
Initial state Intermediate developmental stages
Endstate or ultimate attainment
6
Universal Grammar General Cognition Other Language(s)
Grammatical restructuring Developmental errors Other language related errors
Native speaker Non-native speaker
7
Types of errors
Developmental errors Errors made by all learners (L1 L2 HLL) common to all L2 learners regardless of the L1 linguistic phenomena that are ungrammatical in BOTH their native and target languages
Transfer errors (L2 acquisition and bilingualism)
traceable to the learnersrsquo L1 or bilingualrsquos other language
8
Developmental Errors
bull overregularization of irregular plurals and past tense forms in English
ndash feets childrens speaked runned bull omission of inflectional morphology
ndash two book she speak yesterday I walk
Other Examples
bull Learners of English and of Spanish omit prepositions in relative clauses and questions (Klein 1993 Perpintildeaacuten 2010) (This is the man I told you)
bull Resumptive pronouns in Swedish relative clauses (Hyltenstam 1984)
bull Word order rules in L1 Turkish learner of German (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1994)
bull Some Japanese learners of English exhibit wh-scope marking (Schultz 2011)
10
Transfer Errors
bull Unlike in L1 acquisition L2 learners make errors due to influence from their native language
bull Especially at earliest stages of development L2 learners impose the structural properties of the L1 onto the L2
bull Speakers of different native languages make different errors in the target language
bull L1 transfer happens at the phonological lexical semantic phonological and syntactic levels
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS
(Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR
Steady State L1 Grammar
ILG2 ILG3 Steady State ILG
L2 INPUT
11
Acquisition of Morphology
bull Children acquiring their L1 learn the inflectional and derivational morphology of their language and reach mastery (90) between the ages of 3 and 6 years old
bull Morphology is not mastered at native speaker levels by L2 learners and heritage speakers
bull Bottleneck Hypothesis (Slabakova 2008)
Derivational morphology
HAS LEXICAL INFORMATION derivations of new words
causative morphemes
transitivizing morphemes
other word-formation morphemes
13
Functional Morphology
bull Interfaces with syntax
bull Carries syntactic information
bull Is the locus of crosslinguistic variation
14
What is in a morpheme Form-meaning mapping Inflectional Morpheme Example plural -s in English Phonological forms s z əz Meaning [+ plural] (more than one) Syntactic distribution attaches to Ns only
Derivational Morpheme Example Causative -DIr in Turkish Phonological forms ır dır uumlr duumlr Meaning [+ logical subject + transitive] Syntactic distribution attaches to transitive and intransitive V
15
The Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere 2009)
bull Formal features include phonological syntactic and semantic features bundled together on the lexical items of every language
bull Languages differ in what features they encode in the various pieces of functional morphology
16
Lardiere (2009) p 173
bull ldquo[a]ssembling the particular lexical items of a second language requires that the learner reconfigure features from the way these are represented in the L1 into new formal configurations on possibly quite different types of lexical items in the L2rdquo
bull Learning lexical items with bundles of features in new configurations appears to be the most important learning task
17
L1 influence in morphology
bull We need to look at morphologically different languages
bull Languages that seem to behave syntactically similarly but have different morphological realizations of a given phenomenon
Transitivity Alternations
Alternating Verbs
(1) a The thief broke the window
b The window broke
Non-alternating Verbs
(2) a Julia cut the branch
b The branch cut
Transitivity Alternations
Unaccusative (3) a The rabbit disappeared b The magician disappeared the rabbit c The magician made the rabbit disappear Unergative (4) a Peter laughed
b The clown laughed Peter
c The clown made Peter laugh
Errors in L1 English (Bowerman 1982)
(5) a Suppletive C 29 Irsquom gonna just fall this on her b Unergatives C 31 Irsquom singing him c Unaccusatives E 37 Irsquom gonna put the washrag and disappear something under the washrag d Periphrastic constructions C 211 I maked him dead on my tricycle E 23 Then I am going to sit on him and made him broken E 23 I donrsquot know O didnrsquot get lsquoem lost (= lose)
Spanish has inchoative morphology
(6) a La mujer cocinoacute la sopa the woman cook-past the soup lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b La sopa se cocinoacute the soup refl-cook-past lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Turkish = Spanish
(7) a Hırsız pencere-ye kır-dı
thief window-acc break-past
lsquoThe thief broke the windowrsquo
b Pencere kır-ıl-dı
window break-pass-past
lsquoThe window brokersquo
Turkish Has Causative Morphology
(8) a Kadın ccedilorba-yı piş-ir-di
woman soup-acc cook-caus-past
lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b Ccedilorba piş-ti
soup cook-past
lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Montrul (2000)
TRIDIRECTIONAL STUDY
L2 English L2 Spanish L2 Turkish bull English NS bull Spanish L1 learners of
English bull Turkish L1 learners of
English
bull Spanish NS bull English L1 learners of
Spanish bull Turkish L1 learners of
Spanish
bull Turkish NS bull English L1 learners of
Turkish bull Spanish L1 learners of
Turkish
SAME METHODOLOGY USED IN THE THREE LANGUAGES
Hypotheses
bull The Full TransferFull Access Hypothesis (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996) states that the ldquoentiretyrdquo of the L1 grammar is the initial state in L2 acquisition
bull Then we should observe no argument structure errors in any of the languages
bull We will observe errors due to morphology eg Spanish and Turkish speakers may have difficulty with zero morphology in English and English speakers may have difficulty with the causative and inchoative morphology of Turkish
Findings
bull L2 learners know that alternating verbs alternate in transitivity and that transitive unaccusative and unergatives do not
bull The L2 learners also accepted transitivity errors with the non-alternating classes in the three languages and regardless of the learnersrsquo L1s
bull Developmental error like in L1 acquisition
L1 influence with derivational morphology
bull Spanish-speaking learners were more accurate with verbs with inchoative morphology in Turkish as L2 than the English speaking learners
bull The Turkish L1 learners were very accurate with Spanish inchoative verbs
bull The English learners in the Turkish study were the least accurate with causative and anticausative morphology
bull The Spanish speaking learners were more accurate than the Turkish learners with causative zero derived forms in English
Case Systems
bull Morphologically overtnon-overt case (Turkish and Hindi vs English)
bull Number of cases (Spanish vs Russian)
bull Nominative-Accusative languages (Korean Japanese Turkish English)
bull Ergative languages (Hindi Basque Inuttitut Diyrbal Mayan languages among others)
Differential Object Marking (DOM)
bull Widespread phenomenon in languages of the world
bull Some direct objects are marked with overt morphology
bull The objects that are marked are more semantically or pragmatically salient than non-marked objects
31
Spanish DOM Animate and specific direct objects are
obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoardquo Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos vio a Lucrecia Marcos saw DOM-Lucrecia Marcos vio el auto Macos saw the car
Romanian DOM
Animate and specific direct objects are obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoperdquo and optionally doubled by an accusative clitic
Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos a văzut pe Lucrecia Marcos cl- saw DOM Lucrecia Marcos văzut casa Macos saw the house
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
simultaneous bilinguals
sequential bilinguals
native speakers
000
000
75
000
000
8333
000
000
10000
000
000
10000
2000
000
10000
3333
3333
10000
5000
3333
10000
5000
5000
10000
7500
5000
10000
8000
6667
10000
9700
6667
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
8571
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
9900
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
0
0
75
0
0
8333
0
0
100
0
0
100
20
0
100
333333333333
3333
100
50
3333
100
50
50
100
75
50
100
80
6667
100
97
6667
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
8571
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
99
100
99
100
99
99
native speakers
sequential bilinguals
simultaneous bilinguals
animate objects (with DOM)
98
67
69
inanimate objects (no DOM)
100
100
98
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
Purposes of this Talk 1 To show that the acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo
ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo languages is constrained by the same mechanisms and undergoes the same processes attested in other languages
1 To show how research on these languages contributes
to bull theory building bull expansion of the empirical research base bull pedagogical practices for heritage second and third
language acquisition
Language Acquisition
bull First (L1)nativemonolingual acquisition
bull Second Language (L2) Acquisition
bull Heritage Language Acquisition (early bilingual acquisition)
Relevant terms
Order of acquisition First language (L1) Second language (L2)
Functional dimension Primary language Secondary language
Sociopolitical dimension Majority language Minority language
Language Acquisition
beginning middle end
Initial state Intermediate developmental stages
Endstate or ultimate attainment
6
Universal Grammar General Cognition Other Language(s)
Grammatical restructuring Developmental errors Other language related errors
Native speaker Non-native speaker
7
Types of errors
Developmental errors Errors made by all learners (L1 L2 HLL) common to all L2 learners regardless of the L1 linguistic phenomena that are ungrammatical in BOTH their native and target languages
Transfer errors (L2 acquisition and bilingualism)
traceable to the learnersrsquo L1 or bilingualrsquos other language
8
Developmental Errors
bull overregularization of irregular plurals and past tense forms in English
ndash feets childrens speaked runned bull omission of inflectional morphology
ndash two book she speak yesterday I walk
Other Examples
bull Learners of English and of Spanish omit prepositions in relative clauses and questions (Klein 1993 Perpintildeaacuten 2010) (This is the man I told you)
bull Resumptive pronouns in Swedish relative clauses (Hyltenstam 1984)
bull Word order rules in L1 Turkish learner of German (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1994)
bull Some Japanese learners of English exhibit wh-scope marking (Schultz 2011)
10
Transfer Errors
bull Unlike in L1 acquisition L2 learners make errors due to influence from their native language
bull Especially at earliest stages of development L2 learners impose the structural properties of the L1 onto the L2
bull Speakers of different native languages make different errors in the target language
bull L1 transfer happens at the phonological lexical semantic phonological and syntactic levels
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS
(Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR
Steady State L1 Grammar
ILG2 ILG3 Steady State ILG
L2 INPUT
11
Acquisition of Morphology
bull Children acquiring their L1 learn the inflectional and derivational morphology of their language and reach mastery (90) between the ages of 3 and 6 years old
bull Morphology is not mastered at native speaker levels by L2 learners and heritage speakers
bull Bottleneck Hypothesis (Slabakova 2008)
Derivational morphology
HAS LEXICAL INFORMATION derivations of new words
causative morphemes
transitivizing morphemes
other word-formation morphemes
13
Functional Morphology
bull Interfaces with syntax
bull Carries syntactic information
bull Is the locus of crosslinguistic variation
14
What is in a morpheme Form-meaning mapping Inflectional Morpheme Example plural -s in English Phonological forms s z əz Meaning [+ plural] (more than one) Syntactic distribution attaches to Ns only
Derivational Morpheme Example Causative -DIr in Turkish Phonological forms ır dır uumlr duumlr Meaning [+ logical subject + transitive] Syntactic distribution attaches to transitive and intransitive V
15
The Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere 2009)
bull Formal features include phonological syntactic and semantic features bundled together on the lexical items of every language
bull Languages differ in what features they encode in the various pieces of functional morphology
16
Lardiere (2009) p 173
bull ldquo[a]ssembling the particular lexical items of a second language requires that the learner reconfigure features from the way these are represented in the L1 into new formal configurations on possibly quite different types of lexical items in the L2rdquo
bull Learning lexical items with bundles of features in new configurations appears to be the most important learning task
17
L1 influence in morphology
bull We need to look at morphologically different languages
bull Languages that seem to behave syntactically similarly but have different morphological realizations of a given phenomenon
Transitivity Alternations
Alternating Verbs
(1) a The thief broke the window
b The window broke
Non-alternating Verbs
(2) a Julia cut the branch
b The branch cut
Transitivity Alternations
Unaccusative (3) a The rabbit disappeared b The magician disappeared the rabbit c The magician made the rabbit disappear Unergative (4) a Peter laughed
b The clown laughed Peter
c The clown made Peter laugh
Errors in L1 English (Bowerman 1982)
(5) a Suppletive C 29 Irsquom gonna just fall this on her b Unergatives C 31 Irsquom singing him c Unaccusatives E 37 Irsquom gonna put the washrag and disappear something under the washrag d Periphrastic constructions C 211 I maked him dead on my tricycle E 23 Then I am going to sit on him and made him broken E 23 I donrsquot know O didnrsquot get lsquoem lost (= lose)
Spanish has inchoative morphology
(6) a La mujer cocinoacute la sopa the woman cook-past the soup lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b La sopa se cocinoacute the soup refl-cook-past lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Turkish = Spanish
(7) a Hırsız pencere-ye kır-dı
thief window-acc break-past
lsquoThe thief broke the windowrsquo
b Pencere kır-ıl-dı
window break-pass-past
lsquoThe window brokersquo
Turkish Has Causative Morphology
(8) a Kadın ccedilorba-yı piş-ir-di
woman soup-acc cook-caus-past
lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b Ccedilorba piş-ti
soup cook-past
lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Montrul (2000)
TRIDIRECTIONAL STUDY
L2 English L2 Spanish L2 Turkish bull English NS bull Spanish L1 learners of
English bull Turkish L1 learners of
English
bull Spanish NS bull English L1 learners of
Spanish bull Turkish L1 learners of
Spanish
bull Turkish NS bull English L1 learners of
Turkish bull Spanish L1 learners of
Turkish
SAME METHODOLOGY USED IN THE THREE LANGUAGES
Hypotheses
bull The Full TransferFull Access Hypothesis (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996) states that the ldquoentiretyrdquo of the L1 grammar is the initial state in L2 acquisition
bull Then we should observe no argument structure errors in any of the languages
bull We will observe errors due to morphology eg Spanish and Turkish speakers may have difficulty with zero morphology in English and English speakers may have difficulty with the causative and inchoative morphology of Turkish
Findings
bull L2 learners know that alternating verbs alternate in transitivity and that transitive unaccusative and unergatives do not
bull The L2 learners also accepted transitivity errors with the non-alternating classes in the three languages and regardless of the learnersrsquo L1s
bull Developmental error like in L1 acquisition
L1 influence with derivational morphology
bull Spanish-speaking learners were more accurate with verbs with inchoative morphology in Turkish as L2 than the English speaking learners
bull The Turkish L1 learners were very accurate with Spanish inchoative verbs
bull The English learners in the Turkish study were the least accurate with causative and anticausative morphology
bull The Spanish speaking learners were more accurate than the Turkish learners with causative zero derived forms in English
Case Systems
bull Morphologically overtnon-overt case (Turkish and Hindi vs English)
bull Number of cases (Spanish vs Russian)
bull Nominative-Accusative languages (Korean Japanese Turkish English)
bull Ergative languages (Hindi Basque Inuttitut Diyrbal Mayan languages among others)
Differential Object Marking (DOM)
bull Widespread phenomenon in languages of the world
bull Some direct objects are marked with overt morphology
bull The objects that are marked are more semantically or pragmatically salient than non-marked objects
31
Spanish DOM Animate and specific direct objects are
obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoardquo Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos vio a Lucrecia Marcos saw DOM-Lucrecia Marcos vio el auto Macos saw the car
Romanian DOM
Animate and specific direct objects are obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoperdquo and optionally doubled by an accusative clitic
Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos a văzut pe Lucrecia Marcos cl- saw DOM Lucrecia Marcos văzut casa Macos saw the house
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
simultaneous bilinguals
sequential bilinguals
native speakers
000
000
75
000
000
8333
000
000
10000
000
000
10000
2000
000
10000
3333
3333
10000
5000
3333
10000
5000
5000
10000
7500
5000
10000
8000
6667
10000
9700
6667
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
8571
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
9900
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
0
0
75
0
0
8333
0
0
100
0
0
100
20
0
100
333333333333
3333
100
50
3333
100
50
50
100
75
50
100
80
6667
100
97
6667
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
8571
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
99
100
99
100
99
99
native speakers
sequential bilinguals
simultaneous bilinguals
animate objects (with DOM)
98
67
69
inanimate objects (no DOM)
100
100
98
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
Language Acquisition
bull First (L1)nativemonolingual acquisition
bull Second Language (L2) Acquisition
bull Heritage Language Acquisition (early bilingual acquisition)
Relevant terms
Order of acquisition First language (L1) Second language (L2)
Functional dimension Primary language Secondary language
Sociopolitical dimension Majority language Minority language
Language Acquisition
beginning middle end
Initial state Intermediate developmental stages
Endstate or ultimate attainment
6
Universal Grammar General Cognition Other Language(s)
Grammatical restructuring Developmental errors Other language related errors
Native speaker Non-native speaker
7
Types of errors
Developmental errors Errors made by all learners (L1 L2 HLL) common to all L2 learners regardless of the L1 linguistic phenomena that are ungrammatical in BOTH their native and target languages
Transfer errors (L2 acquisition and bilingualism)
traceable to the learnersrsquo L1 or bilingualrsquos other language
8
Developmental Errors
bull overregularization of irregular plurals and past tense forms in English
ndash feets childrens speaked runned bull omission of inflectional morphology
ndash two book she speak yesterday I walk
Other Examples
bull Learners of English and of Spanish omit prepositions in relative clauses and questions (Klein 1993 Perpintildeaacuten 2010) (This is the man I told you)
bull Resumptive pronouns in Swedish relative clauses (Hyltenstam 1984)
bull Word order rules in L1 Turkish learner of German (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1994)
bull Some Japanese learners of English exhibit wh-scope marking (Schultz 2011)
10
Transfer Errors
bull Unlike in L1 acquisition L2 learners make errors due to influence from their native language
bull Especially at earliest stages of development L2 learners impose the structural properties of the L1 onto the L2
bull Speakers of different native languages make different errors in the target language
bull L1 transfer happens at the phonological lexical semantic phonological and syntactic levels
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS
(Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR
Steady State L1 Grammar
ILG2 ILG3 Steady State ILG
L2 INPUT
11
Acquisition of Morphology
bull Children acquiring their L1 learn the inflectional and derivational morphology of their language and reach mastery (90) between the ages of 3 and 6 years old
bull Morphology is not mastered at native speaker levels by L2 learners and heritage speakers
bull Bottleneck Hypothesis (Slabakova 2008)
Derivational morphology
HAS LEXICAL INFORMATION derivations of new words
causative morphemes
transitivizing morphemes
other word-formation morphemes
13
Functional Morphology
bull Interfaces with syntax
bull Carries syntactic information
bull Is the locus of crosslinguistic variation
14
What is in a morpheme Form-meaning mapping Inflectional Morpheme Example plural -s in English Phonological forms s z əz Meaning [+ plural] (more than one) Syntactic distribution attaches to Ns only
Derivational Morpheme Example Causative -DIr in Turkish Phonological forms ır dır uumlr duumlr Meaning [+ logical subject + transitive] Syntactic distribution attaches to transitive and intransitive V
15
The Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere 2009)
bull Formal features include phonological syntactic and semantic features bundled together on the lexical items of every language
bull Languages differ in what features they encode in the various pieces of functional morphology
16
Lardiere (2009) p 173
bull ldquo[a]ssembling the particular lexical items of a second language requires that the learner reconfigure features from the way these are represented in the L1 into new formal configurations on possibly quite different types of lexical items in the L2rdquo
bull Learning lexical items with bundles of features in new configurations appears to be the most important learning task
17
L1 influence in morphology
bull We need to look at morphologically different languages
bull Languages that seem to behave syntactically similarly but have different morphological realizations of a given phenomenon
Transitivity Alternations
Alternating Verbs
(1) a The thief broke the window
b The window broke
Non-alternating Verbs
(2) a Julia cut the branch
b The branch cut
Transitivity Alternations
Unaccusative (3) a The rabbit disappeared b The magician disappeared the rabbit c The magician made the rabbit disappear Unergative (4) a Peter laughed
b The clown laughed Peter
c The clown made Peter laugh
Errors in L1 English (Bowerman 1982)
(5) a Suppletive C 29 Irsquom gonna just fall this on her b Unergatives C 31 Irsquom singing him c Unaccusatives E 37 Irsquom gonna put the washrag and disappear something under the washrag d Periphrastic constructions C 211 I maked him dead on my tricycle E 23 Then I am going to sit on him and made him broken E 23 I donrsquot know O didnrsquot get lsquoem lost (= lose)
Spanish has inchoative morphology
(6) a La mujer cocinoacute la sopa the woman cook-past the soup lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b La sopa se cocinoacute the soup refl-cook-past lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Turkish = Spanish
(7) a Hırsız pencere-ye kır-dı
thief window-acc break-past
lsquoThe thief broke the windowrsquo
b Pencere kır-ıl-dı
window break-pass-past
lsquoThe window brokersquo
Turkish Has Causative Morphology
(8) a Kadın ccedilorba-yı piş-ir-di
woman soup-acc cook-caus-past
lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b Ccedilorba piş-ti
soup cook-past
lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Montrul (2000)
TRIDIRECTIONAL STUDY
L2 English L2 Spanish L2 Turkish bull English NS bull Spanish L1 learners of
English bull Turkish L1 learners of
English
bull Spanish NS bull English L1 learners of
Spanish bull Turkish L1 learners of
Spanish
bull Turkish NS bull English L1 learners of
Turkish bull Spanish L1 learners of
Turkish
SAME METHODOLOGY USED IN THE THREE LANGUAGES
Hypotheses
bull The Full TransferFull Access Hypothesis (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996) states that the ldquoentiretyrdquo of the L1 grammar is the initial state in L2 acquisition
bull Then we should observe no argument structure errors in any of the languages
bull We will observe errors due to morphology eg Spanish and Turkish speakers may have difficulty with zero morphology in English and English speakers may have difficulty with the causative and inchoative morphology of Turkish
Findings
bull L2 learners know that alternating verbs alternate in transitivity and that transitive unaccusative and unergatives do not
bull The L2 learners also accepted transitivity errors with the non-alternating classes in the three languages and regardless of the learnersrsquo L1s
bull Developmental error like in L1 acquisition
L1 influence with derivational morphology
bull Spanish-speaking learners were more accurate with verbs with inchoative morphology in Turkish as L2 than the English speaking learners
bull The Turkish L1 learners were very accurate with Spanish inchoative verbs
bull The English learners in the Turkish study were the least accurate with causative and anticausative morphology
bull The Spanish speaking learners were more accurate than the Turkish learners with causative zero derived forms in English
Case Systems
bull Morphologically overtnon-overt case (Turkish and Hindi vs English)
bull Number of cases (Spanish vs Russian)
bull Nominative-Accusative languages (Korean Japanese Turkish English)
bull Ergative languages (Hindi Basque Inuttitut Diyrbal Mayan languages among others)
Differential Object Marking (DOM)
bull Widespread phenomenon in languages of the world
bull Some direct objects are marked with overt morphology
bull The objects that are marked are more semantically or pragmatically salient than non-marked objects
31
Spanish DOM Animate and specific direct objects are
obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoardquo Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos vio a Lucrecia Marcos saw DOM-Lucrecia Marcos vio el auto Macos saw the car
Romanian DOM
Animate and specific direct objects are obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoperdquo and optionally doubled by an accusative clitic
Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos a văzut pe Lucrecia Marcos cl- saw DOM Lucrecia Marcos văzut casa Macos saw the house
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
simultaneous bilinguals
sequential bilinguals
native speakers
000
000
75
000
000
8333
000
000
10000
000
000
10000
2000
000
10000
3333
3333
10000
5000
3333
10000
5000
5000
10000
7500
5000
10000
8000
6667
10000
9700
6667
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
8571
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
9900
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
0
0
75
0
0
8333
0
0
100
0
0
100
20
0
100
333333333333
3333
100
50
3333
100
50
50
100
75
50
100
80
6667
100
97
6667
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
8571
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
99
100
99
100
99
99
native speakers
sequential bilinguals
simultaneous bilinguals
animate objects (with DOM)
98
67
69
inanimate objects (no DOM)
100
100
98
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
Relevant terms
Order of acquisition First language (L1) Second language (L2)
Functional dimension Primary language Secondary language
Sociopolitical dimension Majority language Minority language
Language Acquisition
beginning middle end
Initial state Intermediate developmental stages
Endstate or ultimate attainment
6
Universal Grammar General Cognition Other Language(s)
Grammatical restructuring Developmental errors Other language related errors
Native speaker Non-native speaker
7
Types of errors
Developmental errors Errors made by all learners (L1 L2 HLL) common to all L2 learners regardless of the L1 linguistic phenomena that are ungrammatical in BOTH their native and target languages
Transfer errors (L2 acquisition and bilingualism)
traceable to the learnersrsquo L1 or bilingualrsquos other language
8
Developmental Errors
bull overregularization of irregular plurals and past tense forms in English
ndash feets childrens speaked runned bull omission of inflectional morphology
ndash two book she speak yesterday I walk
Other Examples
bull Learners of English and of Spanish omit prepositions in relative clauses and questions (Klein 1993 Perpintildeaacuten 2010) (This is the man I told you)
bull Resumptive pronouns in Swedish relative clauses (Hyltenstam 1984)
bull Word order rules in L1 Turkish learner of German (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1994)
bull Some Japanese learners of English exhibit wh-scope marking (Schultz 2011)
10
Transfer Errors
bull Unlike in L1 acquisition L2 learners make errors due to influence from their native language
bull Especially at earliest stages of development L2 learners impose the structural properties of the L1 onto the L2
bull Speakers of different native languages make different errors in the target language
bull L1 transfer happens at the phonological lexical semantic phonological and syntactic levels
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS
(Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR
Steady State L1 Grammar
ILG2 ILG3 Steady State ILG
L2 INPUT
11
Acquisition of Morphology
bull Children acquiring their L1 learn the inflectional and derivational morphology of their language and reach mastery (90) between the ages of 3 and 6 years old
bull Morphology is not mastered at native speaker levels by L2 learners and heritage speakers
bull Bottleneck Hypothesis (Slabakova 2008)
Derivational morphology
HAS LEXICAL INFORMATION derivations of new words
causative morphemes
transitivizing morphemes
other word-formation morphemes
13
Functional Morphology
bull Interfaces with syntax
bull Carries syntactic information
bull Is the locus of crosslinguistic variation
14
What is in a morpheme Form-meaning mapping Inflectional Morpheme Example plural -s in English Phonological forms s z əz Meaning [+ plural] (more than one) Syntactic distribution attaches to Ns only
Derivational Morpheme Example Causative -DIr in Turkish Phonological forms ır dır uumlr duumlr Meaning [+ logical subject + transitive] Syntactic distribution attaches to transitive and intransitive V
15
The Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere 2009)
bull Formal features include phonological syntactic and semantic features bundled together on the lexical items of every language
bull Languages differ in what features they encode in the various pieces of functional morphology
16
Lardiere (2009) p 173
bull ldquo[a]ssembling the particular lexical items of a second language requires that the learner reconfigure features from the way these are represented in the L1 into new formal configurations on possibly quite different types of lexical items in the L2rdquo
bull Learning lexical items with bundles of features in new configurations appears to be the most important learning task
17
L1 influence in morphology
bull We need to look at morphologically different languages
bull Languages that seem to behave syntactically similarly but have different morphological realizations of a given phenomenon
Transitivity Alternations
Alternating Verbs
(1) a The thief broke the window
b The window broke
Non-alternating Verbs
(2) a Julia cut the branch
b The branch cut
Transitivity Alternations
Unaccusative (3) a The rabbit disappeared b The magician disappeared the rabbit c The magician made the rabbit disappear Unergative (4) a Peter laughed
b The clown laughed Peter
c The clown made Peter laugh
Errors in L1 English (Bowerman 1982)
(5) a Suppletive C 29 Irsquom gonna just fall this on her b Unergatives C 31 Irsquom singing him c Unaccusatives E 37 Irsquom gonna put the washrag and disappear something under the washrag d Periphrastic constructions C 211 I maked him dead on my tricycle E 23 Then I am going to sit on him and made him broken E 23 I donrsquot know O didnrsquot get lsquoem lost (= lose)
Spanish has inchoative morphology
(6) a La mujer cocinoacute la sopa the woman cook-past the soup lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b La sopa se cocinoacute the soup refl-cook-past lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Turkish = Spanish
(7) a Hırsız pencere-ye kır-dı
thief window-acc break-past
lsquoThe thief broke the windowrsquo
b Pencere kır-ıl-dı
window break-pass-past
lsquoThe window brokersquo
Turkish Has Causative Morphology
(8) a Kadın ccedilorba-yı piş-ir-di
woman soup-acc cook-caus-past
lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b Ccedilorba piş-ti
soup cook-past
lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Montrul (2000)
TRIDIRECTIONAL STUDY
L2 English L2 Spanish L2 Turkish bull English NS bull Spanish L1 learners of
English bull Turkish L1 learners of
English
bull Spanish NS bull English L1 learners of
Spanish bull Turkish L1 learners of
Spanish
bull Turkish NS bull English L1 learners of
Turkish bull Spanish L1 learners of
Turkish
SAME METHODOLOGY USED IN THE THREE LANGUAGES
Hypotheses
bull The Full TransferFull Access Hypothesis (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996) states that the ldquoentiretyrdquo of the L1 grammar is the initial state in L2 acquisition
bull Then we should observe no argument structure errors in any of the languages
bull We will observe errors due to morphology eg Spanish and Turkish speakers may have difficulty with zero morphology in English and English speakers may have difficulty with the causative and inchoative morphology of Turkish
Findings
bull L2 learners know that alternating verbs alternate in transitivity and that transitive unaccusative and unergatives do not
bull The L2 learners also accepted transitivity errors with the non-alternating classes in the three languages and regardless of the learnersrsquo L1s
bull Developmental error like in L1 acquisition
L1 influence with derivational morphology
bull Spanish-speaking learners were more accurate with verbs with inchoative morphology in Turkish as L2 than the English speaking learners
bull The Turkish L1 learners were very accurate with Spanish inchoative verbs
bull The English learners in the Turkish study were the least accurate with causative and anticausative morphology
bull The Spanish speaking learners were more accurate than the Turkish learners with causative zero derived forms in English
Case Systems
bull Morphologically overtnon-overt case (Turkish and Hindi vs English)
bull Number of cases (Spanish vs Russian)
bull Nominative-Accusative languages (Korean Japanese Turkish English)
bull Ergative languages (Hindi Basque Inuttitut Diyrbal Mayan languages among others)
Differential Object Marking (DOM)
bull Widespread phenomenon in languages of the world
bull Some direct objects are marked with overt morphology
bull The objects that are marked are more semantically or pragmatically salient than non-marked objects
31
Spanish DOM Animate and specific direct objects are
obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoardquo Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos vio a Lucrecia Marcos saw DOM-Lucrecia Marcos vio el auto Macos saw the car
Romanian DOM
Animate and specific direct objects are obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoperdquo and optionally doubled by an accusative clitic
Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos a văzut pe Lucrecia Marcos cl- saw DOM Lucrecia Marcos văzut casa Macos saw the house
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
simultaneous bilinguals
sequential bilinguals
native speakers
000
000
75
000
000
8333
000
000
10000
000
000
10000
2000
000
10000
3333
3333
10000
5000
3333
10000
5000
5000
10000
7500
5000
10000
8000
6667
10000
9700
6667
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
8571
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
9900
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
0
0
75
0
0
8333
0
0
100
0
0
100
20
0
100
333333333333
3333
100
50
3333
100
50
50
100
75
50
100
80
6667
100
97
6667
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
8571
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
99
100
99
100
99
99
native speakers
sequential bilinguals
simultaneous bilinguals
animate objects (with DOM)
98
67
69
inanimate objects (no DOM)
100
100
98
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
Language Acquisition
beginning middle end
Initial state Intermediate developmental stages
Endstate or ultimate attainment
6
Universal Grammar General Cognition Other Language(s)
Grammatical restructuring Developmental errors Other language related errors
Native speaker Non-native speaker
7
Types of errors
Developmental errors Errors made by all learners (L1 L2 HLL) common to all L2 learners regardless of the L1 linguistic phenomena that are ungrammatical in BOTH their native and target languages
Transfer errors (L2 acquisition and bilingualism)
traceable to the learnersrsquo L1 or bilingualrsquos other language
8
Developmental Errors
bull overregularization of irregular plurals and past tense forms in English
ndash feets childrens speaked runned bull omission of inflectional morphology
ndash two book she speak yesterday I walk
Other Examples
bull Learners of English and of Spanish omit prepositions in relative clauses and questions (Klein 1993 Perpintildeaacuten 2010) (This is the man I told you)
bull Resumptive pronouns in Swedish relative clauses (Hyltenstam 1984)
bull Word order rules in L1 Turkish learner of German (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1994)
bull Some Japanese learners of English exhibit wh-scope marking (Schultz 2011)
10
Transfer Errors
bull Unlike in L1 acquisition L2 learners make errors due to influence from their native language
bull Especially at earliest stages of development L2 learners impose the structural properties of the L1 onto the L2
bull Speakers of different native languages make different errors in the target language
bull L1 transfer happens at the phonological lexical semantic phonological and syntactic levels
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS
(Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR
Steady State L1 Grammar
ILG2 ILG3 Steady State ILG
L2 INPUT
11
Acquisition of Morphology
bull Children acquiring their L1 learn the inflectional and derivational morphology of their language and reach mastery (90) between the ages of 3 and 6 years old
bull Morphology is not mastered at native speaker levels by L2 learners and heritage speakers
bull Bottleneck Hypothesis (Slabakova 2008)
Derivational morphology
HAS LEXICAL INFORMATION derivations of new words
causative morphemes
transitivizing morphemes
other word-formation morphemes
13
Functional Morphology
bull Interfaces with syntax
bull Carries syntactic information
bull Is the locus of crosslinguistic variation
14
What is in a morpheme Form-meaning mapping Inflectional Morpheme Example plural -s in English Phonological forms s z əz Meaning [+ plural] (more than one) Syntactic distribution attaches to Ns only
Derivational Morpheme Example Causative -DIr in Turkish Phonological forms ır dır uumlr duumlr Meaning [+ logical subject + transitive] Syntactic distribution attaches to transitive and intransitive V
15
The Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere 2009)
bull Formal features include phonological syntactic and semantic features bundled together on the lexical items of every language
bull Languages differ in what features they encode in the various pieces of functional morphology
16
Lardiere (2009) p 173
bull ldquo[a]ssembling the particular lexical items of a second language requires that the learner reconfigure features from the way these are represented in the L1 into new formal configurations on possibly quite different types of lexical items in the L2rdquo
bull Learning lexical items with bundles of features in new configurations appears to be the most important learning task
17
L1 influence in morphology
bull We need to look at morphologically different languages
bull Languages that seem to behave syntactically similarly but have different morphological realizations of a given phenomenon
Transitivity Alternations
Alternating Verbs
(1) a The thief broke the window
b The window broke
Non-alternating Verbs
(2) a Julia cut the branch
b The branch cut
Transitivity Alternations
Unaccusative (3) a The rabbit disappeared b The magician disappeared the rabbit c The magician made the rabbit disappear Unergative (4) a Peter laughed
b The clown laughed Peter
c The clown made Peter laugh
Errors in L1 English (Bowerman 1982)
(5) a Suppletive C 29 Irsquom gonna just fall this on her b Unergatives C 31 Irsquom singing him c Unaccusatives E 37 Irsquom gonna put the washrag and disappear something under the washrag d Periphrastic constructions C 211 I maked him dead on my tricycle E 23 Then I am going to sit on him and made him broken E 23 I donrsquot know O didnrsquot get lsquoem lost (= lose)
Spanish has inchoative morphology
(6) a La mujer cocinoacute la sopa the woman cook-past the soup lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b La sopa se cocinoacute the soup refl-cook-past lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Turkish = Spanish
(7) a Hırsız pencere-ye kır-dı
thief window-acc break-past
lsquoThe thief broke the windowrsquo
b Pencere kır-ıl-dı
window break-pass-past
lsquoThe window brokersquo
Turkish Has Causative Morphology
(8) a Kadın ccedilorba-yı piş-ir-di
woman soup-acc cook-caus-past
lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b Ccedilorba piş-ti
soup cook-past
lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Montrul (2000)
TRIDIRECTIONAL STUDY
L2 English L2 Spanish L2 Turkish bull English NS bull Spanish L1 learners of
English bull Turkish L1 learners of
English
bull Spanish NS bull English L1 learners of
Spanish bull Turkish L1 learners of
Spanish
bull Turkish NS bull English L1 learners of
Turkish bull Spanish L1 learners of
Turkish
SAME METHODOLOGY USED IN THE THREE LANGUAGES
Hypotheses
bull The Full TransferFull Access Hypothesis (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996) states that the ldquoentiretyrdquo of the L1 grammar is the initial state in L2 acquisition
bull Then we should observe no argument structure errors in any of the languages
bull We will observe errors due to morphology eg Spanish and Turkish speakers may have difficulty with zero morphology in English and English speakers may have difficulty with the causative and inchoative morphology of Turkish
Findings
bull L2 learners know that alternating verbs alternate in transitivity and that transitive unaccusative and unergatives do not
bull The L2 learners also accepted transitivity errors with the non-alternating classes in the three languages and regardless of the learnersrsquo L1s
bull Developmental error like in L1 acquisition
L1 influence with derivational morphology
bull Spanish-speaking learners were more accurate with verbs with inchoative morphology in Turkish as L2 than the English speaking learners
bull The Turkish L1 learners were very accurate with Spanish inchoative verbs
bull The English learners in the Turkish study were the least accurate with causative and anticausative morphology
bull The Spanish speaking learners were more accurate than the Turkish learners with causative zero derived forms in English
Case Systems
bull Morphologically overtnon-overt case (Turkish and Hindi vs English)
bull Number of cases (Spanish vs Russian)
bull Nominative-Accusative languages (Korean Japanese Turkish English)
bull Ergative languages (Hindi Basque Inuttitut Diyrbal Mayan languages among others)
Differential Object Marking (DOM)
bull Widespread phenomenon in languages of the world
bull Some direct objects are marked with overt morphology
bull The objects that are marked are more semantically or pragmatically salient than non-marked objects
31
Spanish DOM Animate and specific direct objects are
obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoardquo Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos vio a Lucrecia Marcos saw DOM-Lucrecia Marcos vio el auto Macos saw the car
Romanian DOM
Animate and specific direct objects are obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoperdquo and optionally doubled by an accusative clitic
Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos a văzut pe Lucrecia Marcos cl- saw DOM Lucrecia Marcos văzut casa Macos saw the house
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
simultaneous bilinguals
sequential bilinguals
native speakers
000
000
75
000
000
8333
000
000
10000
000
000
10000
2000
000
10000
3333
3333
10000
5000
3333
10000
5000
5000
10000
7500
5000
10000
8000
6667
10000
9700
6667
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
8571
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
9900
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
0
0
75
0
0
8333
0
0
100
0
0
100
20
0
100
333333333333
3333
100
50
3333
100
50
50
100
75
50
100
80
6667
100
97
6667
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
8571
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
99
100
99
100
99
99
native speakers
sequential bilinguals
simultaneous bilinguals
animate objects (with DOM)
98
67
69
inanimate objects (no DOM)
100
100
98
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
7
Types of errors
Developmental errors Errors made by all learners (L1 L2 HLL) common to all L2 learners regardless of the L1 linguistic phenomena that are ungrammatical in BOTH their native and target languages
Transfer errors (L2 acquisition and bilingualism)
traceable to the learnersrsquo L1 or bilingualrsquos other language
8
Developmental Errors
bull overregularization of irregular plurals and past tense forms in English
ndash feets childrens speaked runned bull omission of inflectional morphology
ndash two book she speak yesterday I walk
Other Examples
bull Learners of English and of Spanish omit prepositions in relative clauses and questions (Klein 1993 Perpintildeaacuten 2010) (This is the man I told you)
bull Resumptive pronouns in Swedish relative clauses (Hyltenstam 1984)
bull Word order rules in L1 Turkish learner of German (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1994)
bull Some Japanese learners of English exhibit wh-scope marking (Schultz 2011)
10
Transfer Errors
bull Unlike in L1 acquisition L2 learners make errors due to influence from their native language
bull Especially at earliest stages of development L2 learners impose the structural properties of the L1 onto the L2
bull Speakers of different native languages make different errors in the target language
bull L1 transfer happens at the phonological lexical semantic phonological and syntactic levels
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS
(Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR
Steady State L1 Grammar
ILG2 ILG3 Steady State ILG
L2 INPUT
11
Acquisition of Morphology
bull Children acquiring their L1 learn the inflectional and derivational morphology of their language and reach mastery (90) between the ages of 3 and 6 years old
bull Morphology is not mastered at native speaker levels by L2 learners and heritage speakers
bull Bottleneck Hypothesis (Slabakova 2008)
Derivational morphology
HAS LEXICAL INFORMATION derivations of new words
causative morphemes
transitivizing morphemes
other word-formation morphemes
13
Functional Morphology
bull Interfaces with syntax
bull Carries syntactic information
bull Is the locus of crosslinguistic variation
14
What is in a morpheme Form-meaning mapping Inflectional Morpheme Example plural -s in English Phonological forms s z əz Meaning [+ plural] (more than one) Syntactic distribution attaches to Ns only
Derivational Morpheme Example Causative -DIr in Turkish Phonological forms ır dır uumlr duumlr Meaning [+ logical subject + transitive] Syntactic distribution attaches to transitive and intransitive V
15
The Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere 2009)
bull Formal features include phonological syntactic and semantic features bundled together on the lexical items of every language
bull Languages differ in what features they encode in the various pieces of functional morphology
16
Lardiere (2009) p 173
bull ldquo[a]ssembling the particular lexical items of a second language requires that the learner reconfigure features from the way these are represented in the L1 into new formal configurations on possibly quite different types of lexical items in the L2rdquo
bull Learning lexical items with bundles of features in new configurations appears to be the most important learning task
17
L1 influence in morphology
bull We need to look at morphologically different languages
bull Languages that seem to behave syntactically similarly but have different morphological realizations of a given phenomenon
Transitivity Alternations
Alternating Verbs
(1) a The thief broke the window
b The window broke
Non-alternating Verbs
(2) a Julia cut the branch
b The branch cut
Transitivity Alternations
Unaccusative (3) a The rabbit disappeared b The magician disappeared the rabbit c The magician made the rabbit disappear Unergative (4) a Peter laughed
b The clown laughed Peter
c The clown made Peter laugh
Errors in L1 English (Bowerman 1982)
(5) a Suppletive C 29 Irsquom gonna just fall this on her b Unergatives C 31 Irsquom singing him c Unaccusatives E 37 Irsquom gonna put the washrag and disappear something under the washrag d Periphrastic constructions C 211 I maked him dead on my tricycle E 23 Then I am going to sit on him and made him broken E 23 I donrsquot know O didnrsquot get lsquoem lost (= lose)
Spanish has inchoative morphology
(6) a La mujer cocinoacute la sopa the woman cook-past the soup lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b La sopa se cocinoacute the soup refl-cook-past lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Turkish = Spanish
(7) a Hırsız pencere-ye kır-dı
thief window-acc break-past
lsquoThe thief broke the windowrsquo
b Pencere kır-ıl-dı
window break-pass-past
lsquoThe window brokersquo
Turkish Has Causative Morphology
(8) a Kadın ccedilorba-yı piş-ir-di
woman soup-acc cook-caus-past
lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b Ccedilorba piş-ti
soup cook-past
lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Montrul (2000)
TRIDIRECTIONAL STUDY
L2 English L2 Spanish L2 Turkish bull English NS bull Spanish L1 learners of
English bull Turkish L1 learners of
English
bull Spanish NS bull English L1 learners of
Spanish bull Turkish L1 learners of
Spanish
bull Turkish NS bull English L1 learners of
Turkish bull Spanish L1 learners of
Turkish
SAME METHODOLOGY USED IN THE THREE LANGUAGES
Hypotheses
bull The Full TransferFull Access Hypothesis (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996) states that the ldquoentiretyrdquo of the L1 grammar is the initial state in L2 acquisition
bull Then we should observe no argument structure errors in any of the languages
bull We will observe errors due to morphology eg Spanish and Turkish speakers may have difficulty with zero morphology in English and English speakers may have difficulty with the causative and inchoative morphology of Turkish
Findings
bull L2 learners know that alternating verbs alternate in transitivity and that transitive unaccusative and unergatives do not
bull The L2 learners also accepted transitivity errors with the non-alternating classes in the three languages and regardless of the learnersrsquo L1s
bull Developmental error like in L1 acquisition
L1 influence with derivational morphology
bull Spanish-speaking learners were more accurate with verbs with inchoative morphology in Turkish as L2 than the English speaking learners
bull The Turkish L1 learners were very accurate with Spanish inchoative verbs
bull The English learners in the Turkish study were the least accurate with causative and anticausative morphology
bull The Spanish speaking learners were more accurate than the Turkish learners with causative zero derived forms in English
Case Systems
bull Morphologically overtnon-overt case (Turkish and Hindi vs English)
bull Number of cases (Spanish vs Russian)
bull Nominative-Accusative languages (Korean Japanese Turkish English)
bull Ergative languages (Hindi Basque Inuttitut Diyrbal Mayan languages among others)
Differential Object Marking (DOM)
bull Widespread phenomenon in languages of the world
bull Some direct objects are marked with overt morphology
bull The objects that are marked are more semantically or pragmatically salient than non-marked objects
31
Spanish DOM Animate and specific direct objects are
obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoardquo Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos vio a Lucrecia Marcos saw DOM-Lucrecia Marcos vio el auto Macos saw the car
Romanian DOM
Animate and specific direct objects are obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoperdquo and optionally doubled by an accusative clitic
Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos a văzut pe Lucrecia Marcos cl- saw DOM Lucrecia Marcos văzut casa Macos saw the house
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
simultaneous bilinguals
sequential bilinguals
native speakers
000
000
75
000
000
8333
000
000
10000
000
000
10000
2000
000
10000
3333
3333
10000
5000
3333
10000
5000
5000
10000
7500
5000
10000
8000
6667
10000
9700
6667
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
8571
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
9900
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
0
0
75
0
0
8333
0
0
100
0
0
100
20
0
100
333333333333
3333
100
50
3333
100
50
50
100
75
50
100
80
6667
100
97
6667
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
8571
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
99
100
99
100
99
99
native speakers
sequential bilinguals
simultaneous bilinguals
animate objects (with DOM)
98
67
69
inanimate objects (no DOM)
100
100
98
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
8
Developmental Errors
bull overregularization of irregular plurals and past tense forms in English
ndash feets childrens speaked runned bull omission of inflectional morphology
ndash two book she speak yesterday I walk
Other Examples
bull Learners of English and of Spanish omit prepositions in relative clauses and questions (Klein 1993 Perpintildeaacuten 2010) (This is the man I told you)
bull Resumptive pronouns in Swedish relative clauses (Hyltenstam 1984)
bull Word order rules in L1 Turkish learner of German (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1994)
bull Some Japanese learners of English exhibit wh-scope marking (Schultz 2011)
10
Transfer Errors
bull Unlike in L1 acquisition L2 learners make errors due to influence from their native language
bull Especially at earliest stages of development L2 learners impose the structural properties of the L1 onto the L2
bull Speakers of different native languages make different errors in the target language
bull L1 transfer happens at the phonological lexical semantic phonological and syntactic levels
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS
(Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR
Steady State L1 Grammar
ILG2 ILG3 Steady State ILG
L2 INPUT
11
Acquisition of Morphology
bull Children acquiring their L1 learn the inflectional and derivational morphology of their language and reach mastery (90) between the ages of 3 and 6 years old
bull Morphology is not mastered at native speaker levels by L2 learners and heritage speakers
bull Bottleneck Hypothesis (Slabakova 2008)
Derivational morphology
HAS LEXICAL INFORMATION derivations of new words
causative morphemes
transitivizing morphemes
other word-formation morphemes
13
Functional Morphology
bull Interfaces with syntax
bull Carries syntactic information
bull Is the locus of crosslinguistic variation
14
What is in a morpheme Form-meaning mapping Inflectional Morpheme Example plural -s in English Phonological forms s z əz Meaning [+ plural] (more than one) Syntactic distribution attaches to Ns only
Derivational Morpheme Example Causative -DIr in Turkish Phonological forms ır dır uumlr duumlr Meaning [+ logical subject + transitive] Syntactic distribution attaches to transitive and intransitive V
15
The Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere 2009)
bull Formal features include phonological syntactic and semantic features bundled together on the lexical items of every language
bull Languages differ in what features they encode in the various pieces of functional morphology
16
Lardiere (2009) p 173
bull ldquo[a]ssembling the particular lexical items of a second language requires that the learner reconfigure features from the way these are represented in the L1 into new formal configurations on possibly quite different types of lexical items in the L2rdquo
bull Learning lexical items with bundles of features in new configurations appears to be the most important learning task
17
L1 influence in morphology
bull We need to look at morphologically different languages
bull Languages that seem to behave syntactically similarly but have different morphological realizations of a given phenomenon
Transitivity Alternations
Alternating Verbs
(1) a The thief broke the window
b The window broke
Non-alternating Verbs
(2) a Julia cut the branch
b The branch cut
Transitivity Alternations
Unaccusative (3) a The rabbit disappeared b The magician disappeared the rabbit c The magician made the rabbit disappear Unergative (4) a Peter laughed
b The clown laughed Peter
c The clown made Peter laugh
Errors in L1 English (Bowerman 1982)
(5) a Suppletive C 29 Irsquom gonna just fall this on her b Unergatives C 31 Irsquom singing him c Unaccusatives E 37 Irsquom gonna put the washrag and disappear something under the washrag d Periphrastic constructions C 211 I maked him dead on my tricycle E 23 Then I am going to sit on him and made him broken E 23 I donrsquot know O didnrsquot get lsquoem lost (= lose)
Spanish has inchoative morphology
(6) a La mujer cocinoacute la sopa the woman cook-past the soup lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b La sopa se cocinoacute the soup refl-cook-past lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Turkish = Spanish
(7) a Hırsız pencere-ye kır-dı
thief window-acc break-past
lsquoThe thief broke the windowrsquo
b Pencere kır-ıl-dı
window break-pass-past
lsquoThe window brokersquo
Turkish Has Causative Morphology
(8) a Kadın ccedilorba-yı piş-ir-di
woman soup-acc cook-caus-past
lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b Ccedilorba piş-ti
soup cook-past
lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Montrul (2000)
TRIDIRECTIONAL STUDY
L2 English L2 Spanish L2 Turkish bull English NS bull Spanish L1 learners of
English bull Turkish L1 learners of
English
bull Spanish NS bull English L1 learners of
Spanish bull Turkish L1 learners of
Spanish
bull Turkish NS bull English L1 learners of
Turkish bull Spanish L1 learners of
Turkish
SAME METHODOLOGY USED IN THE THREE LANGUAGES
Hypotheses
bull The Full TransferFull Access Hypothesis (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996) states that the ldquoentiretyrdquo of the L1 grammar is the initial state in L2 acquisition
bull Then we should observe no argument structure errors in any of the languages
bull We will observe errors due to morphology eg Spanish and Turkish speakers may have difficulty with zero morphology in English and English speakers may have difficulty with the causative and inchoative morphology of Turkish
Findings
bull L2 learners know that alternating verbs alternate in transitivity and that transitive unaccusative and unergatives do not
bull The L2 learners also accepted transitivity errors with the non-alternating classes in the three languages and regardless of the learnersrsquo L1s
bull Developmental error like in L1 acquisition
L1 influence with derivational morphology
bull Spanish-speaking learners were more accurate with verbs with inchoative morphology in Turkish as L2 than the English speaking learners
bull The Turkish L1 learners were very accurate with Spanish inchoative verbs
bull The English learners in the Turkish study were the least accurate with causative and anticausative morphology
bull The Spanish speaking learners were more accurate than the Turkish learners with causative zero derived forms in English
Case Systems
bull Morphologically overtnon-overt case (Turkish and Hindi vs English)
bull Number of cases (Spanish vs Russian)
bull Nominative-Accusative languages (Korean Japanese Turkish English)
bull Ergative languages (Hindi Basque Inuttitut Diyrbal Mayan languages among others)
Differential Object Marking (DOM)
bull Widespread phenomenon in languages of the world
bull Some direct objects are marked with overt morphology
bull The objects that are marked are more semantically or pragmatically salient than non-marked objects
31
Spanish DOM Animate and specific direct objects are
obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoardquo Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos vio a Lucrecia Marcos saw DOM-Lucrecia Marcos vio el auto Macos saw the car
Romanian DOM
Animate and specific direct objects are obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoperdquo and optionally doubled by an accusative clitic
Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos a văzut pe Lucrecia Marcos cl- saw DOM Lucrecia Marcos văzut casa Macos saw the house
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
simultaneous bilinguals
sequential bilinguals
native speakers
000
000
75
000
000
8333
000
000
10000
000
000
10000
2000
000
10000
3333
3333
10000
5000
3333
10000
5000
5000
10000
7500
5000
10000
8000
6667
10000
9700
6667
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
8571
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
9900
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
0
0
75
0
0
8333
0
0
100
0
0
100
20
0
100
333333333333
3333
100
50
3333
100
50
50
100
75
50
100
80
6667
100
97
6667
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
8571
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
99
100
99
100
99
99
native speakers
sequential bilinguals
simultaneous bilinguals
animate objects (with DOM)
98
67
69
inanimate objects (no DOM)
100
100
98
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
Other Examples
bull Learners of English and of Spanish omit prepositions in relative clauses and questions (Klein 1993 Perpintildeaacuten 2010) (This is the man I told you)
bull Resumptive pronouns in Swedish relative clauses (Hyltenstam 1984)
bull Word order rules in L1 Turkish learner of German (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1994)
bull Some Japanese learners of English exhibit wh-scope marking (Schultz 2011)
10
Transfer Errors
bull Unlike in L1 acquisition L2 learners make errors due to influence from their native language
bull Especially at earliest stages of development L2 learners impose the structural properties of the L1 onto the L2
bull Speakers of different native languages make different errors in the target language
bull L1 transfer happens at the phonological lexical semantic phonological and syntactic levels
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS
(Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR
Steady State L1 Grammar
ILG2 ILG3 Steady State ILG
L2 INPUT
11
Acquisition of Morphology
bull Children acquiring their L1 learn the inflectional and derivational morphology of their language and reach mastery (90) between the ages of 3 and 6 years old
bull Morphology is not mastered at native speaker levels by L2 learners and heritage speakers
bull Bottleneck Hypothesis (Slabakova 2008)
Derivational morphology
HAS LEXICAL INFORMATION derivations of new words
causative morphemes
transitivizing morphemes
other word-formation morphemes
13
Functional Morphology
bull Interfaces with syntax
bull Carries syntactic information
bull Is the locus of crosslinguistic variation
14
What is in a morpheme Form-meaning mapping Inflectional Morpheme Example plural -s in English Phonological forms s z əz Meaning [+ plural] (more than one) Syntactic distribution attaches to Ns only
Derivational Morpheme Example Causative -DIr in Turkish Phonological forms ır dır uumlr duumlr Meaning [+ logical subject + transitive] Syntactic distribution attaches to transitive and intransitive V
15
The Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere 2009)
bull Formal features include phonological syntactic and semantic features bundled together on the lexical items of every language
bull Languages differ in what features they encode in the various pieces of functional morphology
16
Lardiere (2009) p 173
bull ldquo[a]ssembling the particular lexical items of a second language requires that the learner reconfigure features from the way these are represented in the L1 into new formal configurations on possibly quite different types of lexical items in the L2rdquo
bull Learning lexical items with bundles of features in new configurations appears to be the most important learning task
17
L1 influence in morphology
bull We need to look at morphologically different languages
bull Languages that seem to behave syntactically similarly but have different morphological realizations of a given phenomenon
Transitivity Alternations
Alternating Verbs
(1) a The thief broke the window
b The window broke
Non-alternating Verbs
(2) a Julia cut the branch
b The branch cut
Transitivity Alternations
Unaccusative (3) a The rabbit disappeared b The magician disappeared the rabbit c The magician made the rabbit disappear Unergative (4) a Peter laughed
b The clown laughed Peter
c The clown made Peter laugh
Errors in L1 English (Bowerman 1982)
(5) a Suppletive C 29 Irsquom gonna just fall this on her b Unergatives C 31 Irsquom singing him c Unaccusatives E 37 Irsquom gonna put the washrag and disappear something under the washrag d Periphrastic constructions C 211 I maked him dead on my tricycle E 23 Then I am going to sit on him and made him broken E 23 I donrsquot know O didnrsquot get lsquoem lost (= lose)
Spanish has inchoative morphology
(6) a La mujer cocinoacute la sopa the woman cook-past the soup lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b La sopa se cocinoacute the soup refl-cook-past lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Turkish = Spanish
(7) a Hırsız pencere-ye kır-dı
thief window-acc break-past
lsquoThe thief broke the windowrsquo
b Pencere kır-ıl-dı
window break-pass-past
lsquoThe window brokersquo
Turkish Has Causative Morphology
(8) a Kadın ccedilorba-yı piş-ir-di
woman soup-acc cook-caus-past
lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b Ccedilorba piş-ti
soup cook-past
lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Montrul (2000)
TRIDIRECTIONAL STUDY
L2 English L2 Spanish L2 Turkish bull English NS bull Spanish L1 learners of
English bull Turkish L1 learners of
English
bull Spanish NS bull English L1 learners of
Spanish bull Turkish L1 learners of
Spanish
bull Turkish NS bull English L1 learners of
Turkish bull Spanish L1 learners of
Turkish
SAME METHODOLOGY USED IN THE THREE LANGUAGES
Hypotheses
bull The Full TransferFull Access Hypothesis (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996) states that the ldquoentiretyrdquo of the L1 grammar is the initial state in L2 acquisition
bull Then we should observe no argument structure errors in any of the languages
bull We will observe errors due to morphology eg Spanish and Turkish speakers may have difficulty with zero morphology in English and English speakers may have difficulty with the causative and inchoative morphology of Turkish
Findings
bull L2 learners know that alternating verbs alternate in transitivity and that transitive unaccusative and unergatives do not
bull The L2 learners also accepted transitivity errors with the non-alternating classes in the three languages and regardless of the learnersrsquo L1s
bull Developmental error like in L1 acquisition
L1 influence with derivational morphology
bull Spanish-speaking learners were more accurate with verbs with inchoative morphology in Turkish as L2 than the English speaking learners
bull The Turkish L1 learners were very accurate with Spanish inchoative verbs
bull The English learners in the Turkish study were the least accurate with causative and anticausative morphology
bull The Spanish speaking learners were more accurate than the Turkish learners with causative zero derived forms in English
Case Systems
bull Morphologically overtnon-overt case (Turkish and Hindi vs English)
bull Number of cases (Spanish vs Russian)
bull Nominative-Accusative languages (Korean Japanese Turkish English)
bull Ergative languages (Hindi Basque Inuttitut Diyrbal Mayan languages among others)
Differential Object Marking (DOM)
bull Widespread phenomenon in languages of the world
bull Some direct objects are marked with overt morphology
bull The objects that are marked are more semantically or pragmatically salient than non-marked objects
31
Spanish DOM Animate and specific direct objects are
obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoardquo Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos vio a Lucrecia Marcos saw DOM-Lucrecia Marcos vio el auto Macos saw the car
Romanian DOM
Animate and specific direct objects are obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoperdquo and optionally doubled by an accusative clitic
Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos a văzut pe Lucrecia Marcos cl- saw DOM Lucrecia Marcos văzut casa Macos saw the house
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
simultaneous bilinguals
sequential bilinguals
native speakers
000
000
75
000
000
8333
000
000
10000
000
000
10000
2000
000
10000
3333
3333
10000
5000
3333
10000
5000
5000
10000
7500
5000
10000
8000
6667
10000
9700
6667
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
8571
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
9900
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
0
0
75
0
0
8333
0
0
100
0
0
100
20
0
100
333333333333
3333
100
50
3333
100
50
50
100
75
50
100
80
6667
100
97
6667
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
8571
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
99
100
99
100
99
99
native speakers
sequential bilinguals
simultaneous bilinguals
animate objects (with DOM)
98
67
69
inanimate objects (no DOM)
100
100
98
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
10
Transfer Errors
bull Unlike in L1 acquisition L2 learners make errors due to influence from their native language
bull Especially at earliest stages of development L2 learners impose the structural properties of the L1 onto the L2
bull Speakers of different native languages make different errors in the target language
bull L1 transfer happens at the phonological lexical semantic phonological and syntactic levels
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS
(Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR
Steady State L1 Grammar
ILG2 ILG3 Steady State ILG
L2 INPUT
11
Acquisition of Morphology
bull Children acquiring their L1 learn the inflectional and derivational morphology of their language and reach mastery (90) between the ages of 3 and 6 years old
bull Morphology is not mastered at native speaker levels by L2 learners and heritage speakers
bull Bottleneck Hypothesis (Slabakova 2008)
Derivational morphology
HAS LEXICAL INFORMATION derivations of new words
causative morphemes
transitivizing morphemes
other word-formation morphemes
13
Functional Morphology
bull Interfaces with syntax
bull Carries syntactic information
bull Is the locus of crosslinguistic variation
14
What is in a morpheme Form-meaning mapping Inflectional Morpheme Example plural -s in English Phonological forms s z əz Meaning [+ plural] (more than one) Syntactic distribution attaches to Ns only
Derivational Morpheme Example Causative -DIr in Turkish Phonological forms ır dır uumlr duumlr Meaning [+ logical subject + transitive] Syntactic distribution attaches to transitive and intransitive V
15
The Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere 2009)
bull Formal features include phonological syntactic and semantic features bundled together on the lexical items of every language
bull Languages differ in what features they encode in the various pieces of functional morphology
16
Lardiere (2009) p 173
bull ldquo[a]ssembling the particular lexical items of a second language requires that the learner reconfigure features from the way these are represented in the L1 into new formal configurations on possibly quite different types of lexical items in the L2rdquo
bull Learning lexical items with bundles of features in new configurations appears to be the most important learning task
17
L1 influence in morphology
bull We need to look at morphologically different languages
bull Languages that seem to behave syntactically similarly but have different morphological realizations of a given phenomenon
Transitivity Alternations
Alternating Verbs
(1) a The thief broke the window
b The window broke
Non-alternating Verbs
(2) a Julia cut the branch
b The branch cut
Transitivity Alternations
Unaccusative (3) a The rabbit disappeared b The magician disappeared the rabbit c The magician made the rabbit disappear Unergative (4) a Peter laughed
b The clown laughed Peter
c The clown made Peter laugh
Errors in L1 English (Bowerman 1982)
(5) a Suppletive C 29 Irsquom gonna just fall this on her b Unergatives C 31 Irsquom singing him c Unaccusatives E 37 Irsquom gonna put the washrag and disappear something under the washrag d Periphrastic constructions C 211 I maked him dead on my tricycle E 23 Then I am going to sit on him and made him broken E 23 I donrsquot know O didnrsquot get lsquoem lost (= lose)
Spanish has inchoative morphology
(6) a La mujer cocinoacute la sopa the woman cook-past the soup lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b La sopa se cocinoacute the soup refl-cook-past lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Turkish = Spanish
(7) a Hırsız pencere-ye kır-dı
thief window-acc break-past
lsquoThe thief broke the windowrsquo
b Pencere kır-ıl-dı
window break-pass-past
lsquoThe window brokersquo
Turkish Has Causative Morphology
(8) a Kadın ccedilorba-yı piş-ir-di
woman soup-acc cook-caus-past
lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b Ccedilorba piş-ti
soup cook-past
lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Montrul (2000)
TRIDIRECTIONAL STUDY
L2 English L2 Spanish L2 Turkish bull English NS bull Spanish L1 learners of
English bull Turkish L1 learners of
English
bull Spanish NS bull English L1 learners of
Spanish bull Turkish L1 learners of
Spanish
bull Turkish NS bull English L1 learners of
Turkish bull Spanish L1 learners of
Turkish
SAME METHODOLOGY USED IN THE THREE LANGUAGES
Hypotheses
bull The Full TransferFull Access Hypothesis (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996) states that the ldquoentiretyrdquo of the L1 grammar is the initial state in L2 acquisition
bull Then we should observe no argument structure errors in any of the languages
bull We will observe errors due to morphology eg Spanish and Turkish speakers may have difficulty with zero morphology in English and English speakers may have difficulty with the causative and inchoative morphology of Turkish
Findings
bull L2 learners know that alternating verbs alternate in transitivity and that transitive unaccusative and unergatives do not
bull The L2 learners also accepted transitivity errors with the non-alternating classes in the three languages and regardless of the learnersrsquo L1s
bull Developmental error like in L1 acquisition
L1 influence with derivational morphology
bull Spanish-speaking learners were more accurate with verbs with inchoative morphology in Turkish as L2 than the English speaking learners
bull The Turkish L1 learners were very accurate with Spanish inchoative verbs
bull The English learners in the Turkish study were the least accurate with causative and anticausative morphology
bull The Spanish speaking learners were more accurate than the Turkish learners with causative zero derived forms in English
Case Systems
bull Morphologically overtnon-overt case (Turkish and Hindi vs English)
bull Number of cases (Spanish vs Russian)
bull Nominative-Accusative languages (Korean Japanese Turkish English)
bull Ergative languages (Hindi Basque Inuttitut Diyrbal Mayan languages among others)
Differential Object Marking (DOM)
bull Widespread phenomenon in languages of the world
bull Some direct objects are marked with overt morphology
bull The objects that are marked are more semantically or pragmatically salient than non-marked objects
31
Spanish DOM Animate and specific direct objects are
obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoardquo Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos vio a Lucrecia Marcos saw DOM-Lucrecia Marcos vio el auto Macos saw the car
Romanian DOM
Animate and specific direct objects are obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoperdquo and optionally doubled by an accusative clitic
Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos a văzut pe Lucrecia Marcos cl- saw DOM Lucrecia Marcos văzut casa Macos saw the house
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
simultaneous bilinguals
sequential bilinguals
native speakers
000
000
75
000
000
8333
000
000
10000
000
000
10000
2000
000
10000
3333
3333
10000
5000
3333
10000
5000
5000
10000
7500
5000
10000
8000
6667
10000
9700
6667
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
8571
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
9900
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
0
0
75
0
0
8333
0
0
100
0
0
100
20
0
100
333333333333
3333
100
50
3333
100
50
50
100
75
50
100
80
6667
100
97
6667
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
8571
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
99
100
99
100
99
99
native speakers
sequential bilinguals
simultaneous bilinguals
animate objects (with DOM)
98
67
69
inanimate objects (no DOM)
100
100
98
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS
(Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR
Steady State L1 Grammar
ILG2 ILG3 Steady State ILG
L2 INPUT
11
Acquisition of Morphology
bull Children acquiring their L1 learn the inflectional and derivational morphology of their language and reach mastery (90) between the ages of 3 and 6 years old
bull Morphology is not mastered at native speaker levels by L2 learners and heritage speakers
bull Bottleneck Hypothesis (Slabakova 2008)
Derivational morphology
HAS LEXICAL INFORMATION derivations of new words
causative morphemes
transitivizing morphemes
other word-formation morphemes
13
Functional Morphology
bull Interfaces with syntax
bull Carries syntactic information
bull Is the locus of crosslinguistic variation
14
What is in a morpheme Form-meaning mapping Inflectional Morpheme Example plural -s in English Phonological forms s z əz Meaning [+ plural] (more than one) Syntactic distribution attaches to Ns only
Derivational Morpheme Example Causative -DIr in Turkish Phonological forms ır dır uumlr duumlr Meaning [+ logical subject + transitive] Syntactic distribution attaches to transitive and intransitive V
15
The Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere 2009)
bull Formal features include phonological syntactic and semantic features bundled together on the lexical items of every language
bull Languages differ in what features they encode in the various pieces of functional morphology
16
Lardiere (2009) p 173
bull ldquo[a]ssembling the particular lexical items of a second language requires that the learner reconfigure features from the way these are represented in the L1 into new formal configurations on possibly quite different types of lexical items in the L2rdquo
bull Learning lexical items with bundles of features in new configurations appears to be the most important learning task
17
L1 influence in morphology
bull We need to look at morphologically different languages
bull Languages that seem to behave syntactically similarly but have different morphological realizations of a given phenomenon
Transitivity Alternations
Alternating Verbs
(1) a The thief broke the window
b The window broke
Non-alternating Verbs
(2) a Julia cut the branch
b The branch cut
Transitivity Alternations
Unaccusative (3) a The rabbit disappeared b The magician disappeared the rabbit c The magician made the rabbit disappear Unergative (4) a Peter laughed
b The clown laughed Peter
c The clown made Peter laugh
Errors in L1 English (Bowerman 1982)
(5) a Suppletive C 29 Irsquom gonna just fall this on her b Unergatives C 31 Irsquom singing him c Unaccusatives E 37 Irsquom gonna put the washrag and disappear something under the washrag d Periphrastic constructions C 211 I maked him dead on my tricycle E 23 Then I am going to sit on him and made him broken E 23 I donrsquot know O didnrsquot get lsquoem lost (= lose)
Spanish has inchoative morphology
(6) a La mujer cocinoacute la sopa the woman cook-past the soup lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b La sopa se cocinoacute the soup refl-cook-past lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Turkish = Spanish
(7) a Hırsız pencere-ye kır-dı
thief window-acc break-past
lsquoThe thief broke the windowrsquo
b Pencere kır-ıl-dı
window break-pass-past
lsquoThe window brokersquo
Turkish Has Causative Morphology
(8) a Kadın ccedilorba-yı piş-ir-di
woman soup-acc cook-caus-past
lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b Ccedilorba piş-ti
soup cook-past
lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Montrul (2000)
TRIDIRECTIONAL STUDY
L2 English L2 Spanish L2 Turkish bull English NS bull Spanish L1 learners of
English bull Turkish L1 learners of
English
bull Spanish NS bull English L1 learners of
Spanish bull Turkish L1 learners of
Spanish
bull Turkish NS bull English L1 learners of
Turkish bull Spanish L1 learners of
Turkish
SAME METHODOLOGY USED IN THE THREE LANGUAGES
Hypotheses
bull The Full TransferFull Access Hypothesis (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996) states that the ldquoentiretyrdquo of the L1 grammar is the initial state in L2 acquisition
bull Then we should observe no argument structure errors in any of the languages
bull We will observe errors due to morphology eg Spanish and Turkish speakers may have difficulty with zero morphology in English and English speakers may have difficulty with the causative and inchoative morphology of Turkish
Findings
bull L2 learners know that alternating verbs alternate in transitivity and that transitive unaccusative and unergatives do not
bull The L2 learners also accepted transitivity errors with the non-alternating classes in the three languages and regardless of the learnersrsquo L1s
bull Developmental error like in L1 acquisition
L1 influence with derivational morphology
bull Spanish-speaking learners were more accurate with verbs with inchoative morphology in Turkish as L2 than the English speaking learners
bull The Turkish L1 learners were very accurate with Spanish inchoative verbs
bull The English learners in the Turkish study were the least accurate with causative and anticausative morphology
bull The Spanish speaking learners were more accurate than the Turkish learners with causative zero derived forms in English
Case Systems
bull Morphologically overtnon-overt case (Turkish and Hindi vs English)
bull Number of cases (Spanish vs Russian)
bull Nominative-Accusative languages (Korean Japanese Turkish English)
bull Ergative languages (Hindi Basque Inuttitut Diyrbal Mayan languages among others)
Differential Object Marking (DOM)
bull Widespread phenomenon in languages of the world
bull Some direct objects are marked with overt morphology
bull The objects that are marked are more semantically or pragmatically salient than non-marked objects
31
Spanish DOM Animate and specific direct objects are
obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoardquo Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos vio a Lucrecia Marcos saw DOM-Lucrecia Marcos vio el auto Macos saw the car
Romanian DOM
Animate and specific direct objects are obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoperdquo and optionally doubled by an accusative clitic
Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos a văzut pe Lucrecia Marcos cl- saw DOM Lucrecia Marcos văzut casa Macos saw the house
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
simultaneous bilinguals
sequential bilinguals
native speakers
000
000
75
000
000
8333
000
000
10000
000
000
10000
2000
000
10000
3333
3333
10000
5000
3333
10000
5000
5000
10000
7500
5000
10000
8000
6667
10000
9700
6667
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
8571
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
9900
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
0
0
75
0
0
8333
0
0
100
0
0
100
20
0
100
333333333333
3333
100
50
3333
100
50
50
100
75
50
100
80
6667
100
97
6667
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
8571
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
99
100
99
100
99
99
native speakers
sequential bilinguals
simultaneous bilinguals
animate objects (with DOM)
98
67
69
inanimate objects (no DOM)
100
100
98
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
Acquisition of Morphology
bull Children acquiring their L1 learn the inflectional and derivational morphology of their language and reach mastery (90) between the ages of 3 and 6 years old
bull Morphology is not mastered at native speaker levels by L2 learners and heritage speakers
bull Bottleneck Hypothesis (Slabakova 2008)
Derivational morphology
HAS LEXICAL INFORMATION derivations of new words
causative morphemes
transitivizing morphemes
other word-formation morphemes
13
Functional Morphology
bull Interfaces with syntax
bull Carries syntactic information
bull Is the locus of crosslinguistic variation
14
What is in a morpheme Form-meaning mapping Inflectional Morpheme Example plural -s in English Phonological forms s z əz Meaning [+ plural] (more than one) Syntactic distribution attaches to Ns only
Derivational Morpheme Example Causative -DIr in Turkish Phonological forms ır dır uumlr duumlr Meaning [+ logical subject + transitive] Syntactic distribution attaches to transitive and intransitive V
15
The Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere 2009)
bull Formal features include phonological syntactic and semantic features bundled together on the lexical items of every language
bull Languages differ in what features they encode in the various pieces of functional morphology
16
Lardiere (2009) p 173
bull ldquo[a]ssembling the particular lexical items of a second language requires that the learner reconfigure features from the way these are represented in the L1 into new formal configurations on possibly quite different types of lexical items in the L2rdquo
bull Learning lexical items with bundles of features in new configurations appears to be the most important learning task
17
L1 influence in morphology
bull We need to look at morphologically different languages
bull Languages that seem to behave syntactically similarly but have different morphological realizations of a given phenomenon
Transitivity Alternations
Alternating Verbs
(1) a The thief broke the window
b The window broke
Non-alternating Verbs
(2) a Julia cut the branch
b The branch cut
Transitivity Alternations
Unaccusative (3) a The rabbit disappeared b The magician disappeared the rabbit c The magician made the rabbit disappear Unergative (4) a Peter laughed
b The clown laughed Peter
c The clown made Peter laugh
Errors in L1 English (Bowerman 1982)
(5) a Suppletive C 29 Irsquom gonna just fall this on her b Unergatives C 31 Irsquom singing him c Unaccusatives E 37 Irsquom gonna put the washrag and disappear something under the washrag d Periphrastic constructions C 211 I maked him dead on my tricycle E 23 Then I am going to sit on him and made him broken E 23 I donrsquot know O didnrsquot get lsquoem lost (= lose)
Spanish has inchoative morphology
(6) a La mujer cocinoacute la sopa the woman cook-past the soup lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b La sopa se cocinoacute the soup refl-cook-past lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Turkish = Spanish
(7) a Hırsız pencere-ye kır-dı
thief window-acc break-past
lsquoThe thief broke the windowrsquo
b Pencere kır-ıl-dı
window break-pass-past
lsquoThe window brokersquo
Turkish Has Causative Morphology
(8) a Kadın ccedilorba-yı piş-ir-di
woman soup-acc cook-caus-past
lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b Ccedilorba piş-ti
soup cook-past
lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Montrul (2000)
TRIDIRECTIONAL STUDY
L2 English L2 Spanish L2 Turkish bull English NS bull Spanish L1 learners of
English bull Turkish L1 learners of
English
bull Spanish NS bull English L1 learners of
Spanish bull Turkish L1 learners of
Spanish
bull Turkish NS bull English L1 learners of
Turkish bull Spanish L1 learners of
Turkish
SAME METHODOLOGY USED IN THE THREE LANGUAGES
Hypotheses
bull The Full TransferFull Access Hypothesis (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996) states that the ldquoentiretyrdquo of the L1 grammar is the initial state in L2 acquisition
bull Then we should observe no argument structure errors in any of the languages
bull We will observe errors due to morphology eg Spanish and Turkish speakers may have difficulty with zero morphology in English and English speakers may have difficulty with the causative and inchoative morphology of Turkish
Findings
bull L2 learners know that alternating verbs alternate in transitivity and that transitive unaccusative and unergatives do not
bull The L2 learners also accepted transitivity errors with the non-alternating classes in the three languages and regardless of the learnersrsquo L1s
bull Developmental error like in L1 acquisition
L1 influence with derivational morphology
bull Spanish-speaking learners were more accurate with verbs with inchoative morphology in Turkish as L2 than the English speaking learners
bull The Turkish L1 learners were very accurate with Spanish inchoative verbs
bull The English learners in the Turkish study were the least accurate with causative and anticausative morphology
bull The Spanish speaking learners were more accurate than the Turkish learners with causative zero derived forms in English
Case Systems
bull Morphologically overtnon-overt case (Turkish and Hindi vs English)
bull Number of cases (Spanish vs Russian)
bull Nominative-Accusative languages (Korean Japanese Turkish English)
bull Ergative languages (Hindi Basque Inuttitut Diyrbal Mayan languages among others)
Differential Object Marking (DOM)
bull Widespread phenomenon in languages of the world
bull Some direct objects are marked with overt morphology
bull The objects that are marked are more semantically or pragmatically salient than non-marked objects
31
Spanish DOM Animate and specific direct objects are
obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoardquo Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos vio a Lucrecia Marcos saw DOM-Lucrecia Marcos vio el auto Macos saw the car
Romanian DOM
Animate and specific direct objects are obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoperdquo and optionally doubled by an accusative clitic
Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos a văzut pe Lucrecia Marcos cl- saw DOM Lucrecia Marcos văzut casa Macos saw the house
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
simultaneous bilinguals
sequential bilinguals
native speakers
000
000
75
000
000
8333
000
000
10000
000
000
10000
2000
000
10000
3333
3333
10000
5000
3333
10000
5000
5000
10000
7500
5000
10000
8000
6667
10000
9700
6667
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
8571
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
9900
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
0
0
75
0
0
8333
0
0
100
0
0
100
20
0
100
333333333333
3333
100
50
3333
100
50
50
100
75
50
100
80
6667
100
97
6667
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
8571
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
99
100
99
100
99
99
native speakers
sequential bilinguals
simultaneous bilinguals
animate objects (with DOM)
98
67
69
inanimate objects (no DOM)
100
100
98
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
Derivational morphology
HAS LEXICAL INFORMATION derivations of new words
causative morphemes
transitivizing morphemes
other word-formation morphemes
13
Functional Morphology
bull Interfaces with syntax
bull Carries syntactic information
bull Is the locus of crosslinguistic variation
14
What is in a morpheme Form-meaning mapping Inflectional Morpheme Example plural -s in English Phonological forms s z əz Meaning [+ plural] (more than one) Syntactic distribution attaches to Ns only
Derivational Morpheme Example Causative -DIr in Turkish Phonological forms ır dır uumlr duumlr Meaning [+ logical subject + transitive] Syntactic distribution attaches to transitive and intransitive V
15
The Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere 2009)
bull Formal features include phonological syntactic and semantic features bundled together on the lexical items of every language
bull Languages differ in what features they encode in the various pieces of functional morphology
16
Lardiere (2009) p 173
bull ldquo[a]ssembling the particular lexical items of a second language requires that the learner reconfigure features from the way these are represented in the L1 into new formal configurations on possibly quite different types of lexical items in the L2rdquo
bull Learning lexical items with bundles of features in new configurations appears to be the most important learning task
17
L1 influence in morphology
bull We need to look at morphologically different languages
bull Languages that seem to behave syntactically similarly but have different morphological realizations of a given phenomenon
Transitivity Alternations
Alternating Verbs
(1) a The thief broke the window
b The window broke
Non-alternating Verbs
(2) a Julia cut the branch
b The branch cut
Transitivity Alternations
Unaccusative (3) a The rabbit disappeared b The magician disappeared the rabbit c The magician made the rabbit disappear Unergative (4) a Peter laughed
b The clown laughed Peter
c The clown made Peter laugh
Errors in L1 English (Bowerman 1982)
(5) a Suppletive C 29 Irsquom gonna just fall this on her b Unergatives C 31 Irsquom singing him c Unaccusatives E 37 Irsquom gonna put the washrag and disappear something under the washrag d Periphrastic constructions C 211 I maked him dead on my tricycle E 23 Then I am going to sit on him and made him broken E 23 I donrsquot know O didnrsquot get lsquoem lost (= lose)
Spanish has inchoative morphology
(6) a La mujer cocinoacute la sopa the woman cook-past the soup lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b La sopa se cocinoacute the soup refl-cook-past lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Turkish = Spanish
(7) a Hırsız pencere-ye kır-dı
thief window-acc break-past
lsquoThe thief broke the windowrsquo
b Pencere kır-ıl-dı
window break-pass-past
lsquoThe window brokersquo
Turkish Has Causative Morphology
(8) a Kadın ccedilorba-yı piş-ir-di
woman soup-acc cook-caus-past
lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b Ccedilorba piş-ti
soup cook-past
lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Montrul (2000)
TRIDIRECTIONAL STUDY
L2 English L2 Spanish L2 Turkish bull English NS bull Spanish L1 learners of
English bull Turkish L1 learners of
English
bull Spanish NS bull English L1 learners of
Spanish bull Turkish L1 learners of
Spanish
bull Turkish NS bull English L1 learners of
Turkish bull Spanish L1 learners of
Turkish
SAME METHODOLOGY USED IN THE THREE LANGUAGES
Hypotheses
bull The Full TransferFull Access Hypothesis (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996) states that the ldquoentiretyrdquo of the L1 grammar is the initial state in L2 acquisition
bull Then we should observe no argument structure errors in any of the languages
bull We will observe errors due to morphology eg Spanish and Turkish speakers may have difficulty with zero morphology in English and English speakers may have difficulty with the causative and inchoative morphology of Turkish
Findings
bull L2 learners know that alternating verbs alternate in transitivity and that transitive unaccusative and unergatives do not
bull The L2 learners also accepted transitivity errors with the non-alternating classes in the three languages and regardless of the learnersrsquo L1s
bull Developmental error like in L1 acquisition
L1 influence with derivational morphology
bull Spanish-speaking learners were more accurate with verbs with inchoative morphology in Turkish as L2 than the English speaking learners
bull The Turkish L1 learners were very accurate with Spanish inchoative verbs
bull The English learners in the Turkish study were the least accurate with causative and anticausative morphology
bull The Spanish speaking learners were more accurate than the Turkish learners with causative zero derived forms in English
Case Systems
bull Morphologically overtnon-overt case (Turkish and Hindi vs English)
bull Number of cases (Spanish vs Russian)
bull Nominative-Accusative languages (Korean Japanese Turkish English)
bull Ergative languages (Hindi Basque Inuttitut Diyrbal Mayan languages among others)
Differential Object Marking (DOM)
bull Widespread phenomenon in languages of the world
bull Some direct objects are marked with overt morphology
bull The objects that are marked are more semantically or pragmatically salient than non-marked objects
31
Spanish DOM Animate and specific direct objects are
obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoardquo Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos vio a Lucrecia Marcos saw DOM-Lucrecia Marcos vio el auto Macos saw the car
Romanian DOM
Animate and specific direct objects are obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoperdquo and optionally doubled by an accusative clitic
Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos a văzut pe Lucrecia Marcos cl- saw DOM Lucrecia Marcos văzut casa Macos saw the house
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
simultaneous bilinguals
sequential bilinguals
native speakers
000
000
75
000
000
8333
000
000
10000
000
000
10000
2000
000
10000
3333
3333
10000
5000
3333
10000
5000
5000
10000
7500
5000
10000
8000
6667
10000
9700
6667
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
8571
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
9900
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
0
0
75
0
0
8333
0
0
100
0
0
100
20
0
100
333333333333
3333
100
50
3333
100
50
50
100
75
50
100
80
6667
100
97
6667
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
8571
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
99
100
99
100
99
99
native speakers
sequential bilinguals
simultaneous bilinguals
animate objects (with DOM)
98
67
69
inanimate objects (no DOM)
100
100
98
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
Functional Morphology
bull Interfaces with syntax
bull Carries syntactic information
bull Is the locus of crosslinguistic variation
14
What is in a morpheme Form-meaning mapping Inflectional Morpheme Example plural -s in English Phonological forms s z əz Meaning [+ plural] (more than one) Syntactic distribution attaches to Ns only
Derivational Morpheme Example Causative -DIr in Turkish Phonological forms ır dır uumlr duumlr Meaning [+ logical subject + transitive] Syntactic distribution attaches to transitive and intransitive V
15
The Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere 2009)
bull Formal features include phonological syntactic and semantic features bundled together on the lexical items of every language
bull Languages differ in what features they encode in the various pieces of functional morphology
16
Lardiere (2009) p 173
bull ldquo[a]ssembling the particular lexical items of a second language requires that the learner reconfigure features from the way these are represented in the L1 into new formal configurations on possibly quite different types of lexical items in the L2rdquo
bull Learning lexical items with bundles of features in new configurations appears to be the most important learning task
17
L1 influence in morphology
bull We need to look at morphologically different languages
bull Languages that seem to behave syntactically similarly but have different morphological realizations of a given phenomenon
Transitivity Alternations
Alternating Verbs
(1) a The thief broke the window
b The window broke
Non-alternating Verbs
(2) a Julia cut the branch
b The branch cut
Transitivity Alternations
Unaccusative (3) a The rabbit disappeared b The magician disappeared the rabbit c The magician made the rabbit disappear Unergative (4) a Peter laughed
b The clown laughed Peter
c The clown made Peter laugh
Errors in L1 English (Bowerman 1982)
(5) a Suppletive C 29 Irsquom gonna just fall this on her b Unergatives C 31 Irsquom singing him c Unaccusatives E 37 Irsquom gonna put the washrag and disappear something under the washrag d Periphrastic constructions C 211 I maked him dead on my tricycle E 23 Then I am going to sit on him and made him broken E 23 I donrsquot know O didnrsquot get lsquoem lost (= lose)
Spanish has inchoative morphology
(6) a La mujer cocinoacute la sopa the woman cook-past the soup lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b La sopa se cocinoacute the soup refl-cook-past lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Turkish = Spanish
(7) a Hırsız pencere-ye kır-dı
thief window-acc break-past
lsquoThe thief broke the windowrsquo
b Pencere kır-ıl-dı
window break-pass-past
lsquoThe window brokersquo
Turkish Has Causative Morphology
(8) a Kadın ccedilorba-yı piş-ir-di
woman soup-acc cook-caus-past
lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b Ccedilorba piş-ti
soup cook-past
lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Montrul (2000)
TRIDIRECTIONAL STUDY
L2 English L2 Spanish L2 Turkish bull English NS bull Spanish L1 learners of
English bull Turkish L1 learners of
English
bull Spanish NS bull English L1 learners of
Spanish bull Turkish L1 learners of
Spanish
bull Turkish NS bull English L1 learners of
Turkish bull Spanish L1 learners of
Turkish
SAME METHODOLOGY USED IN THE THREE LANGUAGES
Hypotheses
bull The Full TransferFull Access Hypothesis (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996) states that the ldquoentiretyrdquo of the L1 grammar is the initial state in L2 acquisition
bull Then we should observe no argument structure errors in any of the languages
bull We will observe errors due to morphology eg Spanish and Turkish speakers may have difficulty with zero morphology in English and English speakers may have difficulty with the causative and inchoative morphology of Turkish
Findings
bull L2 learners know that alternating verbs alternate in transitivity and that transitive unaccusative and unergatives do not
bull The L2 learners also accepted transitivity errors with the non-alternating classes in the three languages and regardless of the learnersrsquo L1s
bull Developmental error like in L1 acquisition
L1 influence with derivational morphology
bull Spanish-speaking learners were more accurate with verbs with inchoative morphology in Turkish as L2 than the English speaking learners
bull The Turkish L1 learners were very accurate with Spanish inchoative verbs
bull The English learners in the Turkish study were the least accurate with causative and anticausative morphology
bull The Spanish speaking learners were more accurate than the Turkish learners with causative zero derived forms in English
Case Systems
bull Morphologically overtnon-overt case (Turkish and Hindi vs English)
bull Number of cases (Spanish vs Russian)
bull Nominative-Accusative languages (Korean Japanese Turkish English)
bull Ergative languages (Hindi Basque Inuttitut Diyrbal Mayan languages among others)
Differential Object Marking (DOM)
bull Widespread phenomenon in languages of the world
bull Some direct objects are marked with overt morphology
bull The objects that are marked are more semantically or pragmatically salient than non-marked objects
31
Spanish DOM Animate and specific direct objects are
obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoardquo Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos vio a Lucrecia Marcos saw DOM-Lucrecia Marcos vio el auto Macos saw the car
Romanian DOM
Animate and specific direct objects are obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoperdquo and optionally doubled by an accusative clitic
Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos a văzut pe Lucrecia Marcos cl- saw DOM Lucrecia Marcos văzut casa Macos saw the house
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
simultaneous bilinguals
sequential bilinguals
native speakers
000
000
75
000
000
8333
000
000
10000
000
000
10000
2000
000
10000
3333
3333
10000
5000
3333
10000
5000
5000
10000
7500
5000
10000
8000
6667
10000
9700
6667
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
8571
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
9900
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
0
0
75
0
0
8333
0
0
100
0
0
100
20
0
100
333333333333
3333
100
50
3333
100
50
50
100
75
50
100
80
6667
100
97
6667
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
8571
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
99
100
99
100
99
99
native speakers
sequential bilinguals
simultaneous bilinguals
animate objects (with DOM)
98
67
69
inanimate objects (no DOM)
100
100
98
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
What is in a morpheme Form-meaning mapping Inflectional Morpheme Example plural -s in English Phonological forms s z əz Meaning [+ plural] (more than one) Syntactic distribution attaches to Ns only
Derivational Morpheme Example Causative -DIr in Turkish Phonological forms ır dır uumlr duumlr Meaning [+ logical subject + transitive] Syntactic distribution attaches to transitive and intransitive V
15
The Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere 2009)
bull Formal features include phonological syntactic and semantic features bundled together on the lexical items of every language
bull Languages differ in what features they encode in the various pieces of functional morphology
16
Lardiere (2009) p 173
bull ldquo[a]ssembling the particular lexical items of a second language requires that the learner reconfigure features from the way these are represented in the L1 into new formal configurations on possibly quite different types of lexical items in the L2rdquo
bull Learning lexical items with bundles of features in new configurations appears to be the most important learning task
17
L1 influence in morphology
bull We need to look at morphologically different languages
bull Languages that seem to behave syntactically similarly but have different morphological realizations of a given phenomenon
Transitivity Alternations
Alternating Verbs
(1) a The thief broke the window
b The window broke
Non-alternating Verbs
(2) a Julia cut the branch
b The branch cut
Transitivity Alternations
Unaccusative (3) a The rabbit disappeared b The magician disappeared the rabbit c The magician made the rabbit disappear Unergative (4) a Peter laughed
b The clown laughed Peter
c The clown made Peter laugh
Errors in L1 English (Bowerman 1982)
(5) a Suppletive C 29 Irsquom gonna just fall this on her b Unergatives C 31 Irsquom singing him c Unaccusatives E 37 Irsquom gonna put the washrag and disappear something under the washrag d Periphrastic constructions C 211 I maked him dead on my tricycle E 23 Then I am going to sit on him and made him broken E 23 I donrsquot know O didnrsquot get lsquoem lost (= lose)
Spanish has inchoative morphology
(6) a La mujer cocinoacute la sopa the woman cook-past the soup lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b La sopa se cocinoacute the soup refl-cook-past lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Turkish = Spanish
(7) a Hırsız pencere-ye kır-dı
thief window-acc break-past
lsquoThe thief broke the windowrsquo
b Pencere kır-ıl-dı
window break-pass-past
lsquoThe window brokersquo
Turkish Has Causative Morphology
(8) a Kadın ccedilorba-yı piş-ir-di
woman soup-acc cook-caus-past
lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b Ccedilorba piş-ti
soup cook-past
lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Montrul (2000)
TRIDIRECTIONAL STUDY
L2 English L2 Spanish L2 Turkish bull English NS bull Spanish L1 learners of
English bull Turkish L1 learners of
English
bull Spanish NS bull English L1 learners of
Spanish bull Turkish L1 learners of
Spanish
bull Turkish NS bull English L1 learners of
Turkish bull Spanish L1 learners of
Turkish
SAME METHODOLOGY USED IN THE THREE LANGUAGES
Hypotheses
bull The Full TransferFull Access Hypothesis (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996) states that the ldquoentiretyrdquo of the L1 grammar is the initial state in L2 acquisition
bull Then we should observe no argument structure errors in any of the languages
bull We will observe errors due to morphology eg Spanish and Turkish speakers may have difficulty with zero morphology in English and English speakers may have difficulty with the causative and inchoative morphology of Turkish
Findings
bull L2 learners know that alternating verbs alternate in transitivity and that transitive unaccusative and unergatives do not
bull The L2 learners also accepted transitivity errors with the non-alternating classes in the three languages and regardless of the learnersrsquo L1s
bull Developmental error like in L1 acquisition
L1 influence with derivational morphology
bull Spanish-speaking learners were more accurate with verbs with inchoative morphology in Turkish as L2 than the English speaking learners
bull The Turkish L1 learners were very accurate with Spanish inchoative verbs
bull The English learners in the Turkish study were the least accurate with causative and anticausative morphology
bull The Spanish speaking learners were more accurate than the Turkish learners with causative zero derived forms in English
Case Systems
bull Morphologically overtnon-overt case (Turkish and Hindi vs English)
bull Number of cases (Spanish vs Russian)
bull Nominative-Accusative languages (Korean Japanese Turkish English)
bull Ergative languages (Hindi Basque Inuttitut Diyrbal Mayan languages among others)
Differential Object Marking (DOM)
bull Widespread phenomenon in languages of the world
bull Some direct objects are marked with overt morphology
bull The objects that are marked are more semantically or pragmatically salient than non-marked objects
31
Spanish DOM Animate and specific direct objects are
obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoardquo Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos vio a Lucrecia Marcos saw DOM-Lucrecia Marcos vio el auto Macos saw the car
Romanian DOM
Animate and specific direct objects are obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoperdquo and optionally doubled by an accusative clitic
Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos a văzut pe Lucrecia Marcos cl- saw DOM Lucrecia Marcos văzut casa Macos saw the house
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
simultaneous bilinguals
sequential bilinguals
native speakers
000
000
75
000
000
8333
000
000
10000
000
000
10000
2000
000
10000
3333
3333
10000
5000
3333
10000
5000
5000
10000
7500
5000
10000
8000
6667
10000
9700
6667
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
8571
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
9900
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
0
0
75
0
0
8333
0
0
100
0
0
100
20
0
100
333333333333
3333
100
50
3333
100
50
50
100
75
50
100
80
6667
100
97
6667
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
8571
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
99
100
99
100
99
99
native speakers
sequential bilinguals
simultaneous bilinguals
animate objects (with DOM)
98
67
69
inanimate objects (no DOM)
100
100
98
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
The Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere 2009)
bull Formal features include phonological syntactic and semantic features bundled together on the lexical items of every language
bull Languages differ in what features they encode in the various pieces of functional morphology
16
Lardiere (2009) p 173
bull ldquo[a]ssembling the particular lexical items of a second language requires that the learner reconfigure features from the way these are represented in the L1 into new formal configurations on possibly quite different types of lexical items in the L2rdquo
bull Learning lexical items with bundles of features in new configurations appears to be the most important learning task
17
L1 influence in morphology
bull We need to look at morphologically different languages
bull Languages that seem to behave syntactically similarly but have different morphological realizations of a given phenomenon
Transitivity Alternations
Alternating Verbs
(1) a The thief broke the window
b The window broke
Non-alternating Verbs
(2) a Julia cut the branch
b The branch cut
Transitivity Alternations
Unaccusative (3) a The rabbit disappeared b The magician disappeared the rabbit c The magician made the rabbit disappear Unergative (4) a Peter laughed
b The clown laughed Peter
c The clown made Peter laugh
Errors in L1 English (Bowerman 1982)
(5) a Suppletive C 29 Irsquom gonna just fall this on her b Unergatives C 31 Irsquom singing him c Unaccusatives E 37 Irsquom gonna put the washrag and disappear something under the washrag d Periphrastic constructions C 211 I maked him dead on my tricycle E 23 Then I am going to sit on him and made him broken E 23 I donrsquot know O didnrsquot get lsquoem lost (= lose)
Spanish has inchoative morphology
(6) a La mujer cocinoacute la sopa the woman cook-past the soup lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b La sopa se cocinoacute the soup refl-cook-past lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Turkish = Spanish
(7) a Hırsız pencere-ye kır-dı
thief window-acc break-past
lsquoThe thief broke the windowrsquo
b Pencere kır-ıl-dı
window break-pass-past
lsquoThe window brokersquo
Turkish Has Causative Morphology
(8) a Kadın ccedilorba-yı piş-ir-di
woman soup-acc cook-caus-past
lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b Ccedilorba piş-ti
soup cook-past
lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Montrul (2000)
TRIDIRECTIONAL STUDY
L2 English L2 Spanish L2 Turkish bull English NS bull Spanish L1 learners of
English bull Turkish L1 learners of
English
bull Spanish NS bull English L1 learners of
Spanish bull Turkish L1 learners of
Spanish
bull Turkish NS bull English L1 learners of
Turkish bull Spanish L1 learners of
Turkish
SAME METHODOLOGY USED IN THE THREE LANGUAGES
Hypotheses
bull The Full TransferFull Access Hypothesis (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996) states that the ldquoentiretyrdquo of the L1 grammar is the initial state in L2 acquisition
bull Then we should observe no argument structure errors in any of the languages
bull We will observe errors due to morphology eg Spanish and Turkish speakers may have difficulty with zero morphology in English and English speakers may have difficulty with the causative and inchoative morphology of Turkish
Findings
bull L2 learners know that alternating verbs alternate in transitivity and that transitive unaccusative and unergatives do not
bull The L2 learners also accepted transitivity errors with the non-alternating classes in the three languages and regardless of the learnersrsquo L1s
bull Developmental error like in L1 acquisition
L1 influence with derivational morphology
bull Spanish-speaking learners were more accurate with verbs with inchoative morphology in Turkish as L2 than the English speaking learners
bull The Turkish L1 learners were very accurate with Spanish inchoative verbs
bull The English learners in the Turkish study were the least accurate with causative and anticausative morphology
bull The Spanish speaking learners were more accurate than the Turkish learners with causative zero derived forms in English
Case Systems
bull Morphologically overtnon-overt case (Turkish and Hindi vs English)
bull Number of cases (Spanish vs Russian)
bull Nominative-Accusative languages (Korean Japanese Turkish English)
bull Ergative languages (Hindi Basque Inuttitut Diyrbal Mayan languages among others)
Differential Object Marking (DOM)
bull Widespread phenomenon in languages of the world
bull Some direct objects are marked with overt morphology
bull The objects that are marked are more semantically or pragmatically salient than non-marked objects
31
Spanish DOM Animate and specific direct objects are
obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoardquo Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos vio a Lucrecia Marcos saw DOM-Lucrecia Marcos vio el auto Macos saw the car
Romanian DOM
Animate and specific direct objects are obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoperdquo and optionally doubled by an accusative clitic
Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos a văzut pe Lucrecia Marcos cl- saw DOM Lucrecia Marcos văzut casa Macos saw the house
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
simultaneous bilinguals
sequential bilinguals
native speakers
000
000
75
000
000
8333
000
000
10000
000
000
10000
2000
000
10000
3333
3333
10000
5000
3333
10000
5000
5000
10000
7500
5000
10000
8000
6667
10000
9700
6667
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
8571
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
9900
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
0
0
75
0
0
8333
0
0
100
0
0
100
20
0
100
333333333333
3333
100
50
3333
100
50
50
100
75
50
100
80
6667
100
97
6667
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
8571
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
99
100
99
100
99
99
native speakers
sequential bilinguals
simultaneous bilinguals
animate objects (with DOM)
98
67
69
inanimate objects (no DOM)
100
100
98
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
Lardiere (2009) p 173
bull ldquo[a]ssembling the particular lexical items of a second language requires that the learner reconfigure features from the way these are represented in the L1 into new formal configurations on possibly quite different types of lexical items in the L2rdquo
bull Learning lexical items with bundles of features in new configurations appears to be the most important learning task
17
L1 influence in morphology
bull We need to look at morphologically different languages
bull Languages that seem to behave syntactically similarly but have different morphological realizations of a given phenomenon
Transitivity Alternations
Alternating Verbs
(1) a The thief broke the window
b The window broke
Non-alternating Verbs
(2) a Julia cut the branch
b The branch cut
Transitivity Alternations
Unaccusative (3) a The rabbit disappeared b The magician disappeared the rabbit c The magician made the rabbit disappear Unergative (4) a Peter laughed
b The clown laughed Peter
c The clown made Peter laugh
Errors in L1 English (Bowerman 1982)
(5) a Suppletive C 29 Irsquom gonna just fall this on her b Unergatives C 31 Irsquom singing him c Unaccusatives E 37 Irsquom gonna put the washrag and disappear something under the washrag d Periphrastic constructions C 211 I maked him dead on my tricycle E 23 Then I am going to sit on him and made him broken E 23 I donrsquot know O didnrsquot get lsquoem lost (= lose)
Spanish has inchoative morphology
(6) a La mujer cocinoacute la sopa the woman cook-past the soup lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b La sopa se cocinoacute the soup refl-cook-past lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Turkish = Spanish
(7) a Hırsız pencere-ye kır-dı
thief window-acc break-past
lsquoThe thief broke the windowrsquo
b Pencere kır-ıl-dı
window break-pass-past
lsquoThe window brokersquo
Turkish Has Causative Morphology
(8) a Kadın ccedilorba-yı piş-ir-di
woman soup-acc cook-caus-past
lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b Ccedilorba piş-ti
soup cook-past
lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Montrul (2000)
TRIDIRECTIONAL STUDY
L2 English L2 Spanish L2 Turkish bull English NS bull Spanish L1 learners of
English bull Turkish L1 learners of
English
bull Spanish NS bull English L1 learners of
Spanish bull Turkish L1 learners of
Spanish
bull Turkish NS bull English L1 learners of
Turkish bull Spanish L1 learners of
Turkish
SAME METHODOLOGY USED IN THE THREE LANGUAGES
Hypotheses
bull The Full TransferFull Access Hypothesis (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996) states that the ldquoentiretyrdquo of the L1 grammar is the initial state in L2 acquisition
bull Then we should observe no argument structure errors in any of the languages
bull We will observe errors due to morphology eg Spanish and Turkish speakers may have difficulty with zero morphology in English and English speakers may have difficulty with the causative and inchoative morphology of Turkish
Findings
bull L2 learners know that alternating verbs alternate in transitivity and that transitive unaccusative and unergatives do not
bull The L2 learners also accepted transitivity errors with the non-alternating classes in the three languages and regardless of the learnersrsquo L1s
bull Developmental error like in L1 acquisition
L1 influence with derivational morphology
bull Spanish-speaking learners were more accurate with verbs with inchoative morphology in Turkish as L2 than the English speaking learners
bull The Turkish L1 learners were very accurate with Spanish inchoative verbs
bull The English learners in the Turkish study were the least accurate with causative and anticausative morphology
bull The Spanish speaking learners were more accurate than the Turkish learners with causative zero derived forms in English
Case Systems
bull Morphologically overtnon-overt case (Turkish and Hindi vs English)
bull Number of cases (Spanish vs Russian)
bull Nominative-Accusative languages (Korean Japanese Turkish English)
bull Ergative languages (Hindi Basque Inuttitut Diyrbal Mayan languages among others)
Differential Object Marking (DOM)
bull Widespread phenomenon in languages of the world
bull Some direct objects are marked with overt morphology
bull The objects that are marked are more semantically or pragmatically salient than non-marked objects
31
Spanish DOM Animate and specific direct objects are
obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoardquo Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos vio a Lucrecia Marcos saw DOM-Lucrecia Marcos vio el auto Macos saw the car
Romanian DOM
Animate and specific direct objects are obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoperdquo and optionally doubled by an accusative clitic
Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos a văzut pe Lucrecia Marcos cl- saw DOM Lucrecia Marcos văzut casa Macos saw the house
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
simultaneous bilinguals
sequential bilinguals
native speakers
000
000
75
000
000
8333
000
000
10000
000
000
10000
2000
000
10000
3333
3333
10000
5000
3333
10000
5000
5000
10000
7500
5000
10000
8000
6667
10000
9700
6667
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
8571
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
9900
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
0
0
75
0
0
8333
0
0
100
0
0
100
20
0
100
333333333333
3333
100
50
3333
100
50
50
100
75
50
100
80
6667
100
97
6667
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
8571
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
99
100
99
100
99
99
native speakers
sequential bilinguals
simultaneous bilinguals
animate objects (with DOM)
98
67
69
inanimate objects (no DOM)
100
100
98
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
L1 influence in morphology
bull We need to look at morphologically different languages
bull Languages that seem to behave syntactically similarly but have different morphological realizations of a given phenomenon
Transitivity Alternations
Alternating Verbs
(1) a The thief broke the window
b The window broke
Non-alternating Verbs
(2) a Julia cut the branch
b The branch cut
Transitivity Alternations
Unaccusative (3) a The rabbit disappeared b The magician disappeared the rabbit c The magician made the rabbit disappear Unergative (4) a Peter laughed
b The clown laughed Peter
c The clown made Peter laugh
Errors in L1 English (Bowerman 1982)
(5) a Suppletive C 29 Irsquom gonna just fall this on her b Unergatives C 31 Irsquom singing him c Unaccusatives E 37 Irsquom gonna put the washrag and disappear something under the washrag d Periphrastic constructions C 211 I maked him dead on my tricycle E 23 Then I am going to sit on him and made him broken E 23 I donrsquot know O didnrsquot get lsquoem lost (= lose)
Spanish has inchoative morphology
(6) a La mujer cocinoacute la sopa the woman cook-past the soup lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b La sopa se cocinoacute the soup refl-cook-past lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Turkish = Spanish
(7) a Hırsız pencere-ye kır-dı
thief window-acc break-past
lsquoThe thief broke the windowrsquo
b Pencere kır-ıl-dı
window break-pass-past
lsquoThe window brokersquo
Turkish Has Causative Morphology
(8) a Kadın ccedilorba-yı piş-ir-di
woman soup-acc cook-caus-past
lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b Ccedilorba piş-ti
soup cook-past
lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Montrul (2000)
TRIDIRECTIONAL STUDY
L2 English L2 Spanish L2 Turkish bull English NS bull Spanish L1 learners of
English bull Turkish L1 learners of
English
bull Spanish NS bull English L1 learners of
Spanish bull Turkish L1 learners of
Spanish
bull Turkish NS bull English L1 learners of
Turkish bull Spanish L1 learners of
Turkish
SAME METHODOLOGY USED IN THE THREE LANGUAGES
Hypotheses
bull The Full TransferFull Access Hypothesis (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996) states that the ldquoentiretyrdquo of the L1 grammar is the initial state in L2 acquisition
bull Then we should observe no argument structure errors in any of the languages
bull We will observe errors due to morphology eg Spanish and Turkish speakers may have difficulty with zero morphology in English and English speakers may have difficulty with the causative and inchoative morphology of Turkish
Findings
bull L2 learners know that alternating verbs alternate in transitivity and that transitive unaccusative and unergatives do not
bull The L2 learners also accepted transitivity errors with the non-alternating classes in the three languages and regardless of the learnersrsquo L1s
bull Developmental error like in L1 acquisition
L1 influence with derivational morphology
bull Spanish-speaking learners were more accurate with verbs with inchoative morphology in Turkish as L2 than the English speaking learners
bull The Turkish L1 learners were very accurate with Spanish inchoative verbs
bull The English learners in the Turkish study were the least accurate with causative and anticausative morphology
bull The Spanish speaking learners were more accurate than the Turkish learners with causative zero derived forms in English
Case Systems
bull Morphologically overtnon-overt case (Turkish and Hindi vs English)
bull Number of cases (Spanish vs Russian)
bull Nominative-Accusative languages (Korean Japanese Turkish English)
bull Ergative languages (Hindi Basque Inuttitut Diyrbal Mayan languages among others)
Differential Object Marking (DOM)
bull Widespread phenomenon in languages of the world
bull Some direct objects are marked with overt morphology
bull The objects that are marked are more semantically or pragmatically salient than non-marked objects
31
Spanish DOM Animate and specific direct objects are
obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoardquo Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos vio a Lucrecia Marcos saw DOM-Lucrecia Marcos vio el auto Macos saw the car
Romanian DOM
Animate and specific direct objects are obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoperdquo and optionally doubled by an accusative clitic
Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos a văzut pe Lucrecia Marcos cl- saw DOM Lucrecia Marcos văzut casa Macos saw the house
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
simultaneous bilinguals
sequential bilinguals
native speakers
000
000
75
000
000
8333
000
000
10000
000
000
10000
2000
000
10000
3333
3333
10000
5000
3333
10000
5000
5000
10000
7500
5000
10000
8000
6667
10000
9700
6667
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
8571
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
9900
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
0
0
75
0
0
8333
0
0
100
0
0
100
20
0
100
333333333333
3333
100
50
3333
100
50
50
100
75
50
100
80
6667
100
97
6667
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
8571
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
99
100
99
100
99
99
native speakers
sequential bilinguals
simultaneous bilinguals
animate objects (with DOM)
98
67
69
inanimate objects (no DOM)
100
100
98
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
Transitivity Alternations
Alternating Verbs
(1) a The thief broke the window
b The window broke
Non-alternating Verbs
(2) a Julia cut the branch
b The branch cut
Transitivity Alternations
Unaccusative (3) a The rabbit disappeared b The magician disappeared the rabbit c The magician made the rabbit disappear Unergative (4) a Peter laughed
b The clown laughed Peter
c The clown made Peter laugh
Errors in L1 English (Bowerman 1982)
(5) a Suppletive C 29 Irsquom gonna just fall this on her b Unergatives C 31 Irsquom singing him c Unaccusatives E 37 Irsquom gonna put the washrag and disappear something under the washrag d Periphrastic constructions C 211 I maked him dead on my tricycle E 23 Then I am going to sit on him and made him broken E 23 I donrsquot know O didnrsquot get lsquoem lost (= lose)
Spanish has inchoative morphology
(6) a La mujer cocinoacute la sopa the woman cook-past the soup lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b La sopa se cocinoacute the soup refl-cook-past lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Turkish = Spanish
(7) a Hırsız pencere-ye kır-dı
thief window-acc break-past
lsquoThe thief broke the windowrsquo
b Pencere kır-ıl-dı
window break-pass-past
lsquoThe window brokersquo
Turkish Has Causative Morphology
(8) a Kadın ccedilorba-yı piş-ir-di
woman soup-acc cook-caus-past
lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b Ccedilorba piş-ti
soup cook-past
lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Montrul (2000)
TRIDIRECTIONAL STUDY
L2 English L2 Spanish L2 Turkish bull English NS bull Spanish L1 learners of
English bull Turkish L1 learners of
English
bull Spanish NS bull English L1 learners of
Spanish bull Turkish L1 learners of
Spanish
bull Turkish NS bull English L1 learners of
Turkish bull Spanish L1 learners of
Turkish
SAME METHODOLOGY USED IN THE THREE LANGUAGES
Hypotheses
bull The Full TransferFull Access Hypothesis (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996) states that the ldquoentiretyrdquo of the L1 grammar is the initial state in L2 acquisition
bull Then we should observe no argument structure errors in any of the languages
bull We will observe errors due to morphology eg Spanish and Turkish speakers may have difficulty with zero morphology in English and English speakers may have difficulty with the causative and inchoative morphology of Turkish
Findings
bull L2 learners know that alternating verbs alternate in transitivity and that transitive unaccusative and unergatives do not
bull The L2 learners also accepted transitivity errors with the non-alternating classes in the three languages and regardless of the learnersrsquo L1s
bull Developmental error like in L1 acquisition
L1 influence with derivational morphology
bull Spanish-speaking learners were more accurate with verbs with inchoative morphology in Turkish as L2 than the English speaking learners
bull The Turkish L1 learners were very accurate with Spanish inchoative verbs
bull The English learners in the Turkish study were the least accurate with causative and anticausative morphology
bull The Spanish speaking learners were more accurate than the Turkish learners with causative zero derived forms in English
Case Systems
bull Morphologically overtnon-overt case (Turkish and Hindi vs English)
bull Number of cases (Spanish vs Russian)
bull Nominative-Accusative languages (Korean Japanese Turkish English)
bull Ergative languages (Hindi Basque Inuttitut Diyrbal Mayan languages among others)
Differential Object Marking (DOM)
bull Widespread phenomenon in languages of the world
bull Some direct objects are marked with overt morphology
bull The objects that are marked are more semantically or pragmatically salient than non-marked objects
31
Spanish DOM Animate and specific direct objects are
obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoardquo Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos vio a Lucrecia Marcos saw DOM-Lucrecia Marcos vio el auto Macos saw the car
Romanian DOM
Animate and specific direct objects are obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoperdquo and optionally doubled by an accusative clitic
Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos a văzut pe Lucrecia Marcos cl- saw DOM Lucrecia Marcos văzut casa Macos saw the house
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
simultaneous bilinguals
sequential bilinguals
native speakers
000
000
75
000
000
8333
000
000
10000
000
000
10000
2000
000
10000
3333
3333
10000
5000
3333
10000
5000
5000
10000
7500
5000
10000
8000
6667
10000
9700
6667
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
8571
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
9900
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
0
0
75
0
0
8333
0
0
100
0
0
100
20
0
100
333333333333
3333
100
50
3333
100
50
50
100
75
50
100
80
6667
100
97
6667
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
8571
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
99
100
99
100
99
99
native speakers
sequential bilinguals
simultaneous bilinguals
animate objects (with DOM)
98
67
69
inanimate objects (no DOM)
100
100
98
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
Transitivity Alternations
Unaccusative (3) a The rabbit disappeared b The magician disappeared the rabbit c The magician made the rabbit disappear Unergative (4) a Peter laughed
b The clown laughed Peter
c The clown made Peter laugh
Errors in L1 English (Bowerman 1982)
(5) a Suppletive C 29 Irsquom gonna just fall this on her b Unergatives C 31 Irsquom singing him c Unaccusatives E 37 Irsquom gonna put the washrag and disappear something under the washrag d Periphrastic constructions C 211 I maked him dead on my tricycle E 23 Then I am going to sit on him and made him broken E 23 I donrsquot know O didnrsquot get lsquoem lost (= lose)
Spanish has inchoative morphology
(6) a La mujer cocinoacute la sopa the woman cook-past the soup lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b La sopa se cocinoacute the soup refl-cook-past lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Turkish = Spanish
(7) a Hırsız pencere-ye kır-dı
thief window-acc break-past
lsquoThe thief broke the windowrsquo
b Pencere kır-ıl-dı
window break-pass-past
lsquoThe window brokersquo
Turkish Has Causative Morphology
(8) a Kadın ccedilorba-yı piş-ir-di
woman soup-acc cook-caus-past
lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b Ccedilorba piş-ti
soup cook-past
lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Montrul (2000)
TRIDIRECTIONAL STUDY
L2 English L2 Spanish L2 Turkish bull English NS bull Spanish L1 learners of
English bull Turkish L1 learners of
English
bull Spanish NS bull English L1 learners of
Spanish bull Turkish L1 learners of
Spanish
bull Turkish NS bull English L1 learners of
Turkish bull Spanish L1 learners of
Turkish
SAME METHODOLOGY USED IN THE THREE LANGUAGES
Hypotheses
bull The Full TransferFull Access Hypothesis (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996) states that the ldquoentiretyrdquo of the L1 grammar is the initial state in L2 acquisition
bull Then we should observe no argument structure errors in any of the languages
bull We will observe errors due to morphology eg Spanish and Turkish speakers may have difficulty with zero morphology in English and English speakers may have difficulty with the causative and inchoative morphology of Turkish
Findings
bull L2 learners know that alternating verbs alternate in transitivity and that transitive unaccusative and unergatives do not
bull The L2 learners also accepted transitivity errors with the non-alternating classes in the three languages and regardless of the learnersrsquo L1s
bull Developmental error like in L1 acquisition
L1 influence with derivational morphology
bull Spanish-speaking learners were more accurate with verbs with inchoative morphology in Turkish as L2 than the English speaking learners
bull The Turkish L1 learners were very accurate with Spanish inchoative verbs
bull The English learners in the Turkish study were the least accurate with causative and anticausative morphology
bull The Spanish speaking learners were more accurate than the Turkish learners with causative zero derived forms in English
Case Systems
bull Morphologically overtnon-overt case (Turkish and Hindi vs English)
bull Number of cases (Spanish vs Russian)
bull Nominative-Accusative languages (Korean Japanese Turkish English)
bull Ergative languages (Hindi Basque Inuttitut Diyrbal Mayan languages among others)
Differential Object Marking (DOM)
bull Widespread phenomenon in languages of the world
bull Some direct objects are marked with overt morphology
bull The objects that are marked are more semantically or pragmatically salient than non-marked objects
31
Spanish DOM Animate and specific direct objects are
obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoardquo Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos vio a Lucrecia Marcos saw DOM-Lucrecia Marcos vio el auto Macos saw the car
Romanian DOM
Animate and specific direct objects are obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoperdquo and optionally doubled by an accusative clitic
Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos a văzut pe Lucrecia Marcos cl- saw DOM Lucrecia Marcos văzut casa Macos saw the house
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
simultaneous bilinguals
sequential bilinguals
native speakers
000
000
75
000
000
8333
000
000
10000
000
000
10000
2000
000
10000
3333
3333
10000
5000
3333
10000
5000
5000
10000
7500
5000
10000
8000
6667
10000
9700
6667
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
8571
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
9900
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
0
0
75
0
0
8333
0
0
100
0
0
100
20
0
100
333333333333
3333
100
50
3333
100
50
50
100
75
50
100
80
6667
100
97
6667
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
8571
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
99
100
99
100
99
99
native speakers
sequential bilinguals
simultaneous bilinguals
animate objects (with DOM)
98
67
69
inanimate objects (no DOM)
100
100
98
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
Errors in L1 English (Bowerman 1982)
(5) a Suppletive C 29 Irsquom gonna just fall this on her b Unergatives C 31 Irsquom singing him c Unaccusatives E 37 Irsquom gonna put the washrag and disappear something under the washrag d Periphrastic constructions C 211 I maked him dead on my tricycle E 23 Then I am going to sit on him and made him broken E 23 I donrsquot know O didnrsquot get lsquoem lost (= lose)
Spanish has inchoative morphology
(6) a La mujer cocinoacute la sopa the woman cook-past the soup lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b La sopa se cocinoacute the soup refl-cook-past lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Turkish = Spanish
(7) a Hırsız pencere-ye kır-dı
thief window-acc break-past
lsquoThe thief broke the windowrsquo
b Pencere kır-ıl-dı
window break-pass-past
lsquoThe window brokersquo
Turkish Has Causative Morphology
(8) a Kadın ccedilorba-yı piş-ir-di
woman soup-acc cook-caus-past
lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b Ccedilorba piş-ti
soup cook-past
lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Montrul (2000)
TRIDIRECTIONAL STUDY
L2 English L2 Spanish L2 Turkish bull English NS bull Spanish L1 learners of
English bull Turkish L1 learners of
English
bull Spanish NS bull English L1 learners of
Spanish bull Turkish L1 learners of
Spanish
bull Turkish NS bull English L1 learners of
Turkish bull Spanish L1 learners of
Turkish
SAME METHODOLOGY USED IN THE THREE LANGUAGES
Hypotheses
bull The Full TransferFull Access Hypothesis (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996) states that the ldquoentiretyrdquo of the L1 grammar is the initial state in L2 acquisition
bull Then we should observe no argument structure errors in any of the languages
bull We will observe errors due to morphology eg Spanish and Turkish speakers may have difficulty with zero morphology in English and English speakers may have difficulty with the causative and inchoative morphology of Turkish
Findings
bull L2 learners know that alternating verbs alternate in transitivity and that transitive unaccusative and unergatives do not
bull The L2 learners also accepted transitivity errors with the non-alternating classes in the three languages and regardless of the learnersrsquo L1s
bull Developmental error like in L1 acquisition
L1 influence with derivational morphology
bull Spanish-speaking learners were more accurate with verbs with inchoative morphology in Turkish as L2 than the English speaking learners
bull The Turkish L1 learners were very accurate with Spanish inchoative verbs
bull The English learners in the Turkish study were the least accurate with causative and anticausative morphology
bull The Spanish speaking learners were more accurate than the Turkish learners with causative zero derived forms in English
Case Systems
bull Morphologically overtnon-overt case (Turkish and Hindi vs English)
bull Number of cases (Spanish vs Russian)
bull Nominative-Accusative languages (Korean Japanese Turkish English)
bull Ergative languages (Hindi Basque Inuttitut Diyrbal Mayan languages among others)
Differential Object Marking (DOM)
bull Widespread phenomenon in languages of the world
bull Some direct objects are marked with overt morphology
bull The objects that are marked are more semantically or pragmatically salient than non-marked objects
31
Spanish DOM Animate and specific direct objects are
obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoardquo Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos vio a Lucrecia Marcos saw DOM-Lucrecia Marcos vio el auto Macos saw the car
Romanian DOM
Animate and specific direct objects are obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoperdquo and optionally doubled by an accusative clitic
Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos a văzut pe Lucrecia Marcos cl- saw DOM Lucrecia Marcos văzut casa Macos saw the house
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
simultaneous bilinguals
sequential bilinguals
native speakers
000
000
75
000
000
8333
000
000
10000
000
000
10000
2000
000
10000
3333
3333
10000
5000
3333
10000
5000
5000
10000
7500
5000
10000
8000
6667
10000
9700
6667
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
8571
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
9900
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
0
0
75
0
0
8333
0
0
100
0
0
100
20
0
100
333333333333
3333
100
50
3333
100
50
50
100
75
50
100
80
6667
100
97
6667
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
8571
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
99
100
99
100
99
99
native speakers
sequential bilinguals
simultaneous bilinguals
animate objects (with DOM)
98
67
69
inanimate objects (no DOM)
100
100
98
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
Spanish has inchoative morphology
(6) a La mujer cocinoacute la sopa the woman cook-past the soup lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b La sopa se cocinoacute the soup refl-cook-past lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Turkish = Spanish
(7) a Hırsız pencere-ye kır-dı
thief window-acc break-past
lsquoThe thief broke the windowrsquo
b Pencere kır-ıl-dı
window break-pass-past
lsquoThe window brokersquo
Turkish Has Causative Morphology
(8) a Kadın ccedilorba-yı piş-ir-di
woman soup-acc cook-caus-past
lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b Ccedilorba piş-ti
soup cook-past
lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Montrul (2000)
TRIDIRECTIONAL STUDY
L2 English L2 Spanish L2 Turkish bull English NS bull Spanish L1 learners of
English bull Turkish L1 learners of
English
bull Spanish NS bull English L1 learners of
Spanish bull Turkish L1 learners of
Spanish
bull Turkish NS bull English L1 learners of
Turkish bull Spanish L1 learners of
Turkish
SAME METHODOLOGY USED IN THE THREE LANGUAGES
Hypotheses
bull The Full TransferFull Access Hypothesis (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996) states that the ldquoentiretyrdquo of the L1 grammar is the initial state in L2 acquisition
bull Then we should observe no argument structure errors in any of the languages
bull We will observe errors due to morphology eg Spanish and Turkish speakers may have difficulty with zero morphology in English and English speakers may have difficulty with the causative and inchoative morphology of Turkish
Findings
bull L2 learners know that alternating verbs alternate in transitivity and that transitive unaccusative and unergatives do not
bull The L2 learners also accepted transitivity errors with the non-alternating classes in the three languages and regardless of the learnersrsquo L1s
bull Developmental error like in L1 acquisition
L1 influence with derivational morphology
bull Spanish-speaking learners were more accurate with verbs with inchoative morphology in Turkish as L2 than the English speaking learners
bull The Turkish L1 learners were very accurate with Spanish inchoative verbs
bull The English learners in the Turkish study were the least accurate with causative and anticausative morphology
bull The Spanish speaking learners were more accurate than the Turkish learners with causative zero derived forms in English
Case Systems
bull Morphologically overtnon-overt case (Turkish and Hindi vs English)
bull Number of cases (Spanish vs Russian)
bull Nominative-Accusative languages (Korean Japanese Turkish English)
bull Ergative languages (Hindi Basque Inuttitut Diyrbal Mayan languages among others)
Differential Object Marking (DOM)
bull Widespread phenomenon in languages of the world
bull Some direct objects are marked with overt morphology
bull The objects that are marked are more semantically or pragmatically salient than non-marked objects
31
Spanish DOM Animate and specific direct objects are
obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoardquo Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos vio a Lucrecia Marcos saw DOM-Lucrecia Marcos vio el auto Macos saw the car
Romanian DOM
Animate and specific direct objects are obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoperdquo and optionally doubled by an accusative clitic
Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos a văzut pe Lucrecia Marcos cl- saw DOM Lucrecia Marcos văzut casa Macos saw the house
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
simultaneous bilinguals
sequential bilinguals
native speakers
000
000
75
000
000
8333
000
000
10000
000
000
10000
2000
000
10000
3333
3333
10000
5000
3333
10000
5000
5000
10000
7500
5000
10000
8000
6667
10000
9700
6667
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
8571
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
9900
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
0
0
75
0
0
8333
0
0
100
0
0
100
20
0
100
333333333333
3333
100
50
3333
100
50
50
100
75
50
100
80
6667
100
97
6667
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
8571
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
99
100
99
100
99
99
native speakers
sequential bilinguals
simultaneous bilinguals
animate objects (with DOM)
98
67
69
inanimate objects (no DOM)
100
100
98
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
Turkish = Spanish
(7) a Hırsız pencere-ye kır-dı
thief window-acc break-past
lsquoThe thief broke the windowrsquo
b Pencere kır-ıl-dı
window break-pass-past
lsquoThe window brokersquo
Turkish Has Causative Morphology
(8) a Kadın ccedilorba-yı piş-ir-di
woman soup-acc cook-caus-past
lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b Ccedilorba piş-ti
soup cook-past
lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Montrul (2000)
TRIDIRECTIONAL STUDY
L2 English L2 Spanish L2 Turkish bull English NS bull Spanish L1 learners of
English bull Turkish L1 learners of
English
bull Spanish NS bull English L1 learners of
Spanish bull Turkish L1 learners of
Spanish
bull Turkish NS bull English L1 learners of
Turkish bull Spanish L1 learners of
Turkish
SAME METHODOLOGY USED IN THE THREE LANGUAGES
Hypotheses
bull The Full TransferFull Access Hypothesis (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996) states that the ldquoentiretyrdquo of the L1 grammar is the initial state in L2 acquisition
bull Then we should observe no argument structure errors in any of the languages
bull We will observe errors due to morphology eg Spanish and Turkish speakers may have difficulty with zero morphology in English and English speakers may have difficulty with the causative and inchoative morphology of Turkish
Findings
bull L2 learners know that alternating verbs alternate in transitivity and that transitive unaccusative and unergatives do not
bull The L2 learners also accepted transitivity errors with the non-alternating classes in the three languages and regardless of the learnersrsquo L1s
bull Developmental error like in L1 acquisition
L1 influence with derivational morphology
bull Spanish-speaking learners were more accurate with verbs with inchoative morphology in Turkish as L2 than the English speaking learners
bull The Turkish L1 learners were very accurate with Spanish inchoative verbs
bull The English learners in the Turkish study were the least accurate with causative and anticausative morphology
bull The Spanish speaking learners were more accurate than the Turkish learners with causative zero derived forms in English
Case Systems
bull Morphologically overtnon-overt case (Turkish and Hindi vs English)
bull Number of cases (Spanish vs Russian)
bull Nominative-Accusative languages (Korean Japanese Turkish English)
bull Ergative languages (Hindi Basque Inuttitut Diyrbal Mayan languages among others)
Differential Object Marking (DOM)
bull Widespread phenomenon in languages of the world
bull Some direct objects are marked with overt morphology
bull The objects that are marked are more semantically or pragmatically salient than non-marked objects
31
Spanish DOM Animate and specific direct objects are
obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoardquo Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos vio a Lucrecia Marcos saw DOM-Lucrecia Marcos vio el auto Macos saw the car
Romanian DOM
Animate and specific direct objects are obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoperdquo and optionally doubled by an accusative clitic
Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos a văzut pe Lucrecia Marcos cl- saw DOM Lucrecia Marcos văzut casa Macos saw the house
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
simultaneous bilinguals
sequential bilinguals
native speakers
000
000
75
000
000
8333
000
000
10000
000
000
10000
2000
000
10000
3333
3333
10000
5000
3333
10000
5000
5000
10000
7500
5000
10000
8000
6667
10000
9700
6667
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
8571
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
9900
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
0
0
75
0
0
8333
0
0
100
0
0
100
20
0
100
333333333333
3333
100
50
3333
100
50
50
100
75
50
100
80
6667
100
97
6667
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
8571
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
99
100
99
100
99
99
native speakers
sequential bilinguals
simultaneous bilinguals
animate objects (with DOM)
98
67
69
inanimate objects (no DOM)
100
100
98
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
Turkish Has Causative Morphology
(8) a Kadın ccedilorba-yı piş-ir-di
woman soup-acc cook-caus-past
lsquoThe woman cooked the souprsquo
b Ccedilorba piş-ti
soup cook-past
lsquoThe soup cookedrsquo
Montrul (2000)
TRIDIRECTIONAL STUDY
L2 English L2 Spanish L2 Turkish bull English NS bull Spanish L1 learners of
English bull Turkish L1 learners of
English
bull Spanish NS bull English L1 learners of
Spanish bull Turkish L1 learners of
Spanish
bull Turkish NS bull English L1 learners of
Turkish bull Spanish L1 learners of
Turkish
SAME METHODOLOGY USED IN THE THREE LANGUAGES
Hypotheses
bull The Full TransferFull Access Hypothesis (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996) states that the ldquoentiretyrdquo of the L1 grammar is the initial state in L2 acquisition
bull Then we should observe no argument structure errors in any of the languages
bull We will observe errors due to morphology eg Spanish and Turkish speakers may have difficulty with zero morphology in English and English speakers may have difficulty with the causative and inchoative morphology of Turkish
Findings
bull L2 learners know that alternating verbs alternate in transitivity and that transitive unaccusative and unergatives do not
bull The L2 learners also accepted transitivity errors with the non-alternating classes in the three languages and regardless of the learnersrsquo L1s
bull Developmental error like in L1 acquisition
L1 influence with derivational morphology
bull Spanish-speaking learners were more accurate with verbs with inchoative morphology in Turkish as L2 than the English speaking learners
bull The Turkish L1 learners were very accurate with Spanish inchoative verbs
bull The English learners in the Turkish study were the least accurate with causative and anticausative morphology
bull The Spanish speaking learners were more accurate than the Turkish learners with causative zero derived forms in English
Case Systems
bull Morphologically overtnon-overt case (Turkish and Hindi vs English)
bull Number of cases (Spanish vs Russian)
bull Nominative-Accusative languages (Korean Japanese Turkish English)
bull Ergative languages (Hindi Basque Inuttitut Diyrbal Mayan languages among others)
Differential Object Marking (DOM)
bull Widespread phenomenon in languages of the world
bull Some direct objects are marked with overt morphology
bull The objects that are marked are more semantically or pragmatically salient than non-marked objects
31
Spanish DOM Animate and specific direct objects are
obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoardquo Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos vio a Lucrecia Marcos saw DOM-Lucrecia Marcos vio el auto Macos saw the car
Romanian DOM
Animate and specific direct objects are obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoperdquo and optionally doubled by an accusative clitic
Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos a văzut pe Lucrecia Marcos cl- saw DOM Lucrecia Marcos văzut casa Macos saw the house
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
simultaneous bilinguals
sequential bilinguals
native speakers
000
000
75
000
000
8333
000
000
10000
000
000
10000
2000
000
10000
3333
3333
10000
5000
3333
10000
5000
5000
10000
7500
5000
10000
8000
6667
10000
9700
6667
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
8571
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
9900
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
0
0
75
0
0
8333
0
0
100
0
0
100
20
0
100
333333333333
3333
100
50
3333
100
50
50
100
75
50
100
80
6667
100
97
6667
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
8571
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
99
100
99
100
99
99
native speakers
sequential bilinguals
simultaneous bilinguals
animate objects (with DOM)
98
67
69
inanimate objects (no DOM)
100
100
98
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
Montrul (2000)
TRIDIRECTIONAL STUDY
L2 English L2 Spanish L2 Turkish bull English NS bull Spanish L1 learners of
English bull Turkish L1 learners of
English
bull Spanish NS bull English L1 learners of
Spanish bull Turkish L1 learners of
Spanish
bull Turkish NS bull English L1 learners of
Turkish bull Spanish L1 learners of
Turkish
SAME METHODOLOGY USED IN THE THREE LANGUAGES
Hypotheses
bull The Full TransferFull Access Hypothesis (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996) states that the ldquoentiretyrdquo of the L1 grammar is the initial state in L2 acquisition
bull Then we should observe no argument structure errors in any of the languages
bull We will observe errors due to morphology eg Spanish and Turkish speakers may have difficulty with zero morphology in English and English speakers may have difficulty with the causative and inchoative morphology of Turkish
Findings
bull L2 learners know that alternating verbs alternate in transitivity and that transitive unaccusative and unergatives do not
bull The L2 learners also accepted transitivity errors with the non-alternating classes in the three languages and regardless of the learnersrsquo L1s
bull Developmental error like in L1 acquisition
L1 influence with derivational morphology
bull Spanish-speaking learners were more accurate with verbs with inchoative morphology in Turkish as L2 than the English speaking learners
bull The Turkish L1 learners were very accurate with Spanish inchoative verbs
bull The English learners in the Turkish study were the least accurate with causative and anticausative morphology
bull The Spanish speaking learners were more accurate than the Turkish learners with causative zero derived forms in English
Case Systems
bull Morphologically overtnon-overt case (Turkish and Hindi vs English)
bull Number of cases (Spanish vs Russian)
bull Nominative-Accusative languages (Korean Japanese Turkish English)
bull Ergative languages (Hindi Basque Inuttitut Diyrbal Mayan languages among others)
Differential Object Marking (DOM)
bull Widespread phenomenon in languages of the world
bull Some direct objects are marked with overt morphology
bull The objects that are marked are more semantically or pragmatically salient than non-marked objects
31
Spanish DOM Animate and specific direct objects are
obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoardquo Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos vio a Lucrecia Marcos saw DOM-Lucrecia Marcos vio el auto Macos saw the car
Romanian DOM
Animate and specific direct objects are obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoperdquo and optionally doubled by an accusative clitic
Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos a văzut pe Lucrecia Marcos cl- saw DOM Lucrecia Marcos văzut casa Macos saw the house
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
simultaneous bilinguals
sequential bilinguals
native speakers
000
000
75
000
000
8333
000
000
10000
000
000
10000
2000
000
10000
3333
3333
10000
5000
3333
10000
5000
5000
10000
7500
5000
10000
8000
6667
10000
9700
6667
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
8571
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
9900
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
0
0
75
0
0
8333
0
0
100
0
0
100
20
0
100
333333333333
3333
100
50
3333
100
50
50
100
75
50
100
80
6667
100
97
6667
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
8571
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
99
100
99
100
99
99
native speakers
sequential bilinguals
simultaneous bilinguals
animate objects (with DOM)
98
67
69
inanimate objects (no DOM)
100
100
98
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
Hypotheses
bull The Full TransferFull Access Hypothesis (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996) states that the ldquoentiretyrdquo of the L1 grammar is the initial state in L2 acquisition
bull Then we should observe no argument structure errors in any of the languages
bull We will observe errors due to morphology eg Spanish and Turkish speakers may have difficulty with zero morphology in English and English speakers may have difficulty with the causative and inchoative morphology of Turkish
Findings
bull L2 learners know that alternating verbs alternate in transitivity and that transitive unaccusative and unergatives do not
bull The L2 learners also accepted transitivity errors with the non-alternating classes in the three languages and regardless of the learnersrsquo L1s
bull Developmental error like in L1 acquisition
L1 influence with derivational morphology
bull Spanish-speaking learners were more accurate with verbs with inchoative morphology in Turkish as L2 than the English speaking learners
bull The Turkish L1 learners were very accurate with Spanish inchoative verbs
bull The English learners in the Turkish study were the least accurate with causative and anticausative morphology
bull The Spanish speaking learners were more accurate than the Turkish learners with causative zero derived forms in English
Case Systems
bull Morphologically overtnon-overt case (Turkish and Hindi vs English)
bull Number of cases (Spanish vs Russian)
bull Nominative-Accusative languages (Korean Japanese Turkish English)
bull Ergative languages (Hindi Basque Inuttitut Diyrbal Mayan languages among others)
Differential Object Marking (DOM)
bull Widespread phenomenon in languages of the world
bull Some direct objects are marked with overt morphology
bull The objects that are marked are more semantically or pragmatically salient than non-marked objects
31
Spanish DOM Animate and specific direct objects are
obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoardquo Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos vio a Lucrecia Marcos saw DOM-Lucrecia Marcos vio el auto Macos saw the car
Romanian DOM
Animate and specific direct objects are obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoperdquo and optionally doubled by an accusative clitic
Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos a văzut pe Lucrecia Marcos cl- saw DOM Lucrecia Marcos văzut casa Macos saw the house
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
simultaneous bilinguals
sequential bilinguals
native speakers
000
000
75
000
000
8333
000
000
10000
000
000
10000
2000
000
10000
3333
3333
10000
5000
3333
10000
5000
5000
10000
7500
5000
10000
8000
6667
10000
9700
6667
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
8571
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
9900
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
0
0
75
0
0
8333
0
0
100
0
0
100
20
0
100
333333333333
3333
100
50
3333
100
50
50
100
75
50
100
80
6667
100
97
6667
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
8571
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
99
100
99
100
99
99
native speakers
sequential bilinguals
simultaneous bilinguals
animate objects (with DOM)
98
67
69
inanimate objects (no DOM)
100
100
98
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
Findings
bull L2 learners know that alternating verbs alternate in transitivity and that transitive unaccusative and unergatives do not
bull The L2 learners also accepted transitivity errors with the non-alternating classes in the three languages and regardless of the learnersrsquo L1s
bull Developmental error like in L1 acquisition
L1 influence with derivational morphology
bull Spanish-speaking learners were more accurate with verbs with inchoative morphology in Turkish as L2 than the English speaking learners
bull The Turkish L1 learners were very accurate with Spanish inchoative verbs
bull The English learners in the Turkish study were the least accurate with causative and anticausative morphology
bull The Spanish speaking learners were more accurate than the Turkish learners with causative zero derived forms in English
Case Systems
bull Morphologically overtnon-overt case (Turkish and Hindi vs English)
bull Number of cases (Spanish vs Russian)
bull Nominative-Accusative languages (Korean Japanese Turkish English)
bull Ergative languages (Hindi Basque Inuttitut Diyrbal Mayan languages among others)
Differential Object Marking (DOM)
bull Widespread phenomenon in languages of the world
bull Some direct objects are marked with overt morphology
bull The objects that are marked are more semantically or pragmatically salient than non-marked objects
31
Spanish DOM Animate and specific direct objects are
obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoardquo Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos vio a Lucrecia Marcos saw DOM-Lucrecia Marcos vio el auto Macos saw the car
Romanian DOM
Animate and specific direct objects are obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoperdquo and optionally doubled by an accusative clitic
Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos a văzut pe Lucrecia Marcos cl- saw DOM Lucrecia Marcos văzut casa Macos saw the house
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
simultaneous bilinguals
sequential bilinguals
native speakers
000
000
75
000
000
8333
000
000
10000
000
000
10000
2000
000
10000
3333
3333
10000
5000
3333
10000
5000
5000
10000
7500
5000
10000
8000
6667
10000
9700
6667
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
8571
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
9900
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
0
0
75
0
0
8333
0
0
100
0
0
100
20
0
100
333333333333
3333
100
50
3333
100
50
50
100
75
50
100
80
6667
100
97
6667
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
8571
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
99
100
99
100
99
99
native speakers
sequential bilinguals
simultaneous bilinguals
animate objects (with DOM)
98
67
69
inanimate objects (no DOM)
100
100
98
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
L1 influence with derivational morphology
bull Spanish-speaking learners were more accurate with verbs with inchoative morphology in Turkish as L2 than the English speaking learners
bull The Turkish L1 learners were very accurate with Spanish inchoative verbs
bull The English learners in the Turkish study were the least accurate with causative and anticausative morphology
bull The Spanish speaking learners were more accurate than the Turkish learners with causative zero derived forms in English
Case Systems
bull Morphologically overtnon-overt case (Turkish and Hindi vs English)
bull Number of cases (Spanish vs Russian)
bull Nominative-Accusative languages (Korean Japanese Turkish English)
bull Ergative languages (Hindi Basque Inuttitut Diyrbal Mayan languages among others)
Differential Object Marking (DOM)
bull Widespread phenomenon in languages of the world
bull Some direct objects are marked with overt morphology
bull The objects that are marked are more semantically or pragmatically salient than non-marked objects
31
Spanish DOM Animate and specific direct objects are
obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoardquo Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos vio a Lucrecia Marcos saw DOM-Lucrecia Marcos vio el auto Macos saw the car
Romanian DOM
Animate and specific direct objects are obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoperdquo and optionally doubled by an accusative clitic
Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos a văzut pe Lucrecia Marcos cl- saw DOM Lucrecia Marcos văzut casa Macos saw the house
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
simultaneous bilinguals
sequential bilinguals
native speakers
000
000
75
000
000
8333
000
000
10000
000
000
10000
2000
000
10000
3333
3333
10000
5000
3333
10000
5000
5000
10000
7500
5000
10000
8000
6667
10000
9700
6667
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
8571
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
9900
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
0
0
75
0
0
8333
0
0
100
0
0
100
20
0
100
333333333333
3333
100
50
3333
100
50
50
100
75
50
100
80
6667
100
97
6667
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
8571
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
99
100
99
100
99
99
native speakers
sequential bilinguals
simultaneous bilinguals
animate objects (with DOM)
98
67
69
inanimate objects (no DOM)
100
100
98
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
Case Systems
bull Morphologically overtnon-overt case (Turkish and Hindi vs English)
bull Number of cases (Spanish vs Russian)
bull Nominative-Accusative languages (Korean Japanese Turkish English)
bull Ergative languages (Hindi Basque Inuttitut Diyrbal Mayan languages among others)
Differential Object Marking (DOM)
bull Widespread phenomenon in languages of the world
bull Some direct objects are marked with overt morphology
bull The objects that are marked are more semantically or pragmatically salient than non-marked objects
31
Spanish DOM Animate and specific direct objects are
obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoardquo Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos vio a Lucrecia Marcos saw DOM-Lucrecia Marcos vio el auto Macos saw the car
Romanian DOM
Animate and specific direct objects are obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoperdquo and optionally doubled by an accusative clitic
Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos a văzut pe Lucrecia Marcos cl- saw DOM Lucrecia Marcos văzut casa Macos saw the house
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
simultaneous bilinguals
sequential bilinguals
native speakers
000
000
75
000
000
8333
000
000
10000
000
000
10000
2000
000
10000
3333
3333
10000
5000
3333
10000
5000
5000
10000
7500
5000
10000
8000
6667
10000
9700
6667
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
8571
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
9900
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
0
0
75
0
0
8333
0
0
100
0
0
100
20
0
100
333333333333
3333
100
50
3333
100
50
50
100
75
50
100
80
6667
100
97
6667
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
8571
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
99
100
99
100
99
99
native speakers
sequential bilinguals
simultaneous bilinguals
animate objects (with DOM)
98
67
69
inanimate objects (no DOM)
100
100
98
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
Differential Object Marking (DOM)
bull Widespread phenomenon in languages of the world
bull Some direct objects are marked with overt morphology
bull The objects that are marked are more semantically or pragmatically salient than non-marked objects
31
Spanish DOM Animate and specific direct objects are
obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoardquo Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos vio a Lucrecia Marcos saw DOM-Lucrecia Marcos vio el auto Macos saw the car
Romanian DOM
Animate and specific direct objects are obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoperdquo and optionally doubled by an accusative clitic
Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos a văzut pe Lucrecia Marcos cl- saw DOM Lucrecia Marcos văzut casa Macos saw the house
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
simultaneous bilinguals
sequential bilinguals
native speakers
000
000
75
000
000
8333
000
000
10000
000
000
10000
2000
000
10000
3333
3333
10000
5000
3333
10000
5000
5000
10000
7500
5000
10000
8000
6667
10000
9700
6667
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
8571
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
9900
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
0
0
75
0
0
8333
0
0
100
0
0
100
20
0
100
333333333333
3333
100
50
3333
100
50
50
100
75
50
100
80
6667
100
97
6667
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
8571
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
99
100
99
100
99
99
native speakers
sequential bilinguals
simultaneous bilinguals
animate objects (with DOM)
98
67
69
inanimate objects (no DOM)
100
100
98
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
31
Spanish DOM Animate and specific direct objects are
obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoardquo Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos vio a Lucrecia Marcos saw DOM-Lucrecia Marcos vio el auto Macos saw the car
Romanian DOM
Animate and specific direct objects are obligatorily marked with the preposition ldquoperdquo and optionally doubled by an accusative clitic
Inanimate objects are typically unmarked Marcos a văzut pe Lucrecia Marcos cl- saw DOM Lucrecia Marcos văzut casa Macos saw the house
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
simultaneous bilinguals
sequential bilinguals
native speakers
000
000
75
000
000
8333
000
000
10000
000
000
10000
2000
000
10000
3333
3333
10000
5000
3333
10000
5000
5000
10000
7500
5000
10000
8000
6667
10000
9700
6667
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
8571
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
9900
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
0
0
75
0
0
8333
0
0
100
0
0
100
20
0
100
333333333333
3333
100
50
3333
100
50
50
100
75
50
100
80
6667
100
97
6667
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
8571
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
99
100
99
100
99
99
native speakers
sequential bilinguals
simultaneous bilinguals
animate objects (with DOM)
98
67
69
inanimate objects (no DOM)
100
100
98
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
Persian
bull Foroodi-Nejad (2011) tested 4-7 year old children in Iran
bull Oral elicitation of rā bull The 4 year olds already produced DOM with
97 accuracy in obligatory contexts (range 82-100)
bull Accusative case marking is a marker of SLI in Persian-speaking children
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
simultaneous bilinguals
sequential bilinguals
native speakers
000
000
75
000
000
8333
000
000
10000
000
000
10000
2000
000
10000
3333
3333
10000
5000
3333
10000
5000
5000
10000
7500
5000
10000
8000
6667
10000
9700
6667
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
7500
10000
9700
8571
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9700
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
10000
9900
9900
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
0
0
75
0
0
8333
0
0
100
0
0
100
20
0
100
333333333333
3333
100
50
3333
100
50
50
100
75
50
100
80
6667
100
97
6667
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
75
100
97
8571
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
97
99
100
99
100
99
100
99
99
native speakers
sequential bilinguals
simultaneous bilinguals
animate objects (with DOM)
98
67
69
inanimate objects (no DOM)
100
100
98
To resize chart data range drag lower right corner of range
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
animate objects (with DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
inanimate objects (no DOM)
DOM in adult L2 Acquisition
DOM is vulnerable in Spanish as a L2 English-speaking learners omit DOM a lot at earlier stages of development and DOM remains an area of difficulty at the advanced level bull Bowles and Montrul (2009) bull Guijarro Fuentes and Marinis bull Guijarro Fuentes (2012) Form-focused instruction helps to a certain extent in instructed learners (Montrul amp Bowles 2010)
L2 Acquisition of Case in Turkish
English speaking learners
bull Guumlrel (2000) cross-sectional experimental study
bull Haznedar (2006) longitudinal case study
bull L2 learners of Turkish seem to know the word order permutations of Turkish but do not always produce over case morphology
Greek Learners of Turkish (Papadopoulou et al 2010)
21
76
39
64
49
62
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
specific Object (marked) non-specific object (unmarked)
Level I
Level II
Level IIIPerc
enta
ge a
ccur
acy
L1 Transfer
Montrul amp Guumlrel (2014) Turkish learners of Spanish
Montrul (in progress) Romanian learners of Spanish
Feature Specification of DOM
Language Morphological expression
Formal semantic features
Spanish a +animate+specificdefinite
Romanian pe +animate+specificdefinite
Turkish (y)I +specificdefinite
Turkish Learners of Spanish Animate Object
39
12
39 39 38
16
34
25
38
16
34
27
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Turkish Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
2
39
19
36
18
35
28
34
26
33
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish native
Turkish interm
Turkish low
Romanian Learners of Spanish Animate Objects
39
13
39
33
39
15
38
35
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
human definite specific DO human indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
Romanian Learners of Spanish Inanimate Objects
21
4
18
39
13
39
15
39
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
with DOM unmarked with DOM unmarked
inanimate definite specific DO inanimate indefinite DO
Spanish NS
Romanian learners
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian (Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian
Some morphological and syntactic differences in the marking of direct and indirect objects
Object marking is a particularly problematic area of Balochi learners of Persian
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
bull Balochi-speaking children (ages 7-11) receiving schooling in Persian (the majority language) (Low SES)
bull Written compositions
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
bull 68 of indirect objects are marked with rā instead of be
bull Significant omission of rā with direct objects
bull L1 transfer effects and reconfiguration of features
59
Bilingual children (ages 100-300) (Ticio 2015)
bull CHILDES data base
bull 6 simultaneous bilingual children (5 Spanish-English 1 Catalan-Spanish
bull 7462 omission of DOM with animate specific direct object by age 300
bull Unlike monolingual children simultaneous bilingual children do not develop acquisition and mastery of DOM by 300 years of age
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
bull Montrul and Saacutenchez-Walker (2013)
bull Study 1 school-age Spanish bilingual children (Mean age 11)
bull Study 2 young adult heritage speakers and adult immigrants
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
Questions
bull Why is DOM omitted by Spanish heritage speakers
bull Is omission related to the low acoustic salience of the DOM marker in Spanish
bull If so is ldquoardquo equally omitted regardless of syntactic distribution and semantic factors
64
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
Syntactic-semantic complexity
bull Preposition ldquoardquo is also the dative preposition appearing with indirect objects and with dative experiencer subjects (gustar-type verbs)
bull Is ldquoardquo omitted only when it is an instance of ldquoinherentrdquo and of ldquolexicalrdquo case as opposed to structural case
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
Participants Spanish Hindi Romanian
country US US US Heritage speakers (sim bil)
32 30 23 Heritage speakers (seq bil)
24 6 19 Adult immigrants 21 21 35 country Mexico India Romania Younger NS (18-25) 20 20 25 Older NS (40-60) 20 22 21 SES Low-mid High Low-mid-high
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Juan vio a Mariacutea Juan vio Mariacutea
1
2
3
4
HS (sim) HS (seq) Adult Im younger NS older NS
with a
no a
US Groups Mexico Groups
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
1
2
3
4
DOM Indirect Objects Dative Experiencers
HS (sim)
HS (seq)
Adult Im
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
69
100
200
300
400
Hindi HS adult Im younger NS older NS
with ko
without ko
US Groups India Groups
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
70
251
15
235
1
2
3
4
DOM IO Dative Subjects
=
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
71
US Groups Romania Groups
1
2
3
4
Rom HS (sim) Rom HS (seq) adult RomImm
younger RomNS
older Rom NS
pe
no pe
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
72
1
2
3
4
animate direct objectcd animate direct object indirect object locative
Rom HS (sim)
Rom HS (seq)
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Heritage speakers
Adult immigrants
Young adults in country
Older adults in country
Spanish 3657 63
1120 55
0 0
Hindi 1236 30
0 0 0
Romanian 1542 35
0 -- --
73
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
bull Hindi as L2 and as a Heritage Language (Montrul Bhatt Bhatia and Puri under review)
bull Morphological case marking in Hindi
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
Case Particles Studied Morphology Case Grammatical
relation Thematic role Other
features
zero nominative Subject object
Agent patient
ne ergative subject agent +perfective predicate
ko1 accusative Direct object Patienttheme
+specific +human
ko2 dative Indirect object
Goalbeneficiary
ko3 dative subject experiencer
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
Participants
bull 26 Hindi heritage speakers (uninstructed)
bull 24 L2 learners of Hindi (instructed)
bull 23 native speakers of Hindi tested in India
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
Overall Self-Ratings
434
5 5 464
326 312
1
15
2
25
3
35
4
45
5
Hindi speakers in india Hindi heritage speakers L2 learners of Hindi in the US
English
Hindi
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
959
796 766
100
7115 704
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Hindi Speakers in India Hindi HeritageSpeakers
L2 Learners of Hindi
animate specific DO
dative subjects
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
Morphological Variability
bull Observed in L2 learners and Heritage speakers alike
bull Does not occur in L1 acquisition
bull Constrained by semantic and syntactic complexity and distributional reliability of case markers in the input
bull There is L1 influence but that is not all
bull Feature Reassembly Hypothesis
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
What accounts for difficulty
A marked or more complex structure (case morpheme) is usually associated with a cluster of properties --non transparent mappings --non one-to-one relationship --less frequent Difficulty and complexity play a role for the acquisition of morphology in English and in other languages
81
The Interface Hypothesis
(Sorace 2011)
The syntax-semantics interface is not problematic (ie it is eventually acquired at native-speaker level)
The syntax-pragmatics interface presents prolonged difficulty in a variety of bilingual situations
82
Why 1 Underspecification of interface conditions in
representation of grammatical knowledge 2 Crosslinguistic influence in representation or
parsing 3 Processing limitations either inefficient
incremental access to knowledge or coordination of information
4 Quality and quantity of input received in bilingual grammars
5 Bilingualism per se (executive control of two languages in real time)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
The Role of Input
bull Amount of input and frequency is crucial for the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology
bull L2 learners and heritage speakers are exposed to much less input than child L1 learners and this impedes their mastery of the morphology of the target language at native levels
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
The Role of Input Emergentism (OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
bull The processor has a major role to play in computing form-meaning associations (assumptions of both generative and emergentist frameworks)
bull Input related factors (salience frequency and transparency) facilitate the establishment and strengthening of form-meaning mappings at the word and morpheme levels
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
Input Frequency
bull ldquoThe form-meaning mappings that have proven most susceptible to partial acquisition and attrition are those for which the form-meaning mapping is likely to be problematic to the processor either because the formrsquos phonetic profile is acoustically compromised or because its precise semantic function is difficult to discern
bull Such mappings are acquired only with the help of high-frequency instantiations in the input a condition that is not often met in [SLA and] HLArdquo
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
Conclusion
bull The acquisition of other languages is no different from the acquisition of English
bull The same theories that have been advanced on the basis of English apply to the acquisition of other languages
bull Morphological complexity of other languages does not translate into other languages being more ldquodifficultrdquo to acquire
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
Conclusion bull The same processes that have been identified in
language acquisition of English and European languages are at play in the acquisition of other languages
bull Research on ldquootherrdquo languages is critical to advance our current theoretical understanding of the languages and of language acquisition in different situations
bull In order to make contribution to the teaching of these languages we need to understand the developmental schedules of these languages in a monolingual situation
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
Greek Learners of Turkish(Papadopoulou et al 2010)
L1 Transfer
Feature Specification of DOM
Turkish Learners of SpanishAnimate Object
Turkish Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishAnimate Objects
Romanian Learners of SpanishInanimate Objects
DOM by Balochi Learners of Persian(Bohnacker and Mohammadi 2012)
Bohnacker amp Mohammadi (2012)
Indirect Object Marking
DOM
Summary
Bilingual children (ages 100-300)(Ticio 2015)
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Accuracy on DOM Oral Narrative
Accuracy on animate objects by participants
Child and Adult Heritage Speakers
Questions
Syntactic-semantic complexity
Participants
Spanish Animate Specific Direct Objects
Summary ndashrdquoardquo omission US Groups
Hindi Animate Specific Direct Objects
Omission of ndashko by Hindi HS
Romanian Animate Objects without clitic doubling
Omission of pe by Romanian Heritage speakers
Incorrect acceptance of DOM omission in the three languages by individual speakers
Are heritage speakers like L2 learners
Case Particles Studied
Participants
Overall Self-Ratings
Accuracy on Accusative and Dative -ko marking in Oral Production
Morphological Variability
What accounts for difficulty
The Interface Hypothesis(Sorace 2011)
Why
DOM
Some differences between L1 learners L2 learners and heritage speakers
The Role of Input
The Role of Input Emergentism(OrsquoGrady et al 2011)
Input Frequency
Conclusion
Conclusion
Conclusion
Finally
Slide Number 92
Conclusion
bull Are the problem areas common to L2 learners and HL learners related to developmental errors also made by young children or to the influence of the other languages these learners speak
bull There are almost no studies on the ultimate attainment of these languages which are also critical to understand how long it takes to acquire these languages and what is possible for an L2 learner
bull No data on ultimate attainment of languages other than English and a few European languages
Finally
Research on and learning ldquoOther ldquo languages promote bull dissemination of knowledge of the
language(s) more widely bull preservation and enhancement of linguistic
diversity bull fostering greater linguistic cultural and
political understanding bull But more needs to be done
Thank you
The Acquisition of ldquoOtherrdquo ldquoDifferentrdquo ldquoLess Commonrdquo ldquoDistantrdquo Languages A Critical Need
Importance of ldquoOtherrdquoLanguages
Purposes of this Talk
Language Acquisition
Relevant terms
Language Acquisition
Types of errors
Developmental Errors
Other Examples
Transfer Errors
FULL TRANSFERFULL ACCESS HYPOTHESIS (Schwartz amp Sprouse 1996)
