Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T10:28:19.696Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Referent salience affects second language article use*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2012

DANIJELA TRENKIC  and
NATTAMA PONGPAIROJ
DANIJELA TRENKIC*
Affiliation:
University of York
NATTAMA PONGPAIROJ
Affiliation:
Chulalongkorn University
*
Address for correspondence: Danijela Trenkic, Department of Education, University of York, York YO10 5DD, UK[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The effect of referent salience on second language (L2) article production in real time was explored. Thai (–articles) and French (+articles) learners of English described dynamic events involving two referents, one visually cued to be more salient at the point of utterance formulation. Definiteness marking was made communicatively redundant with all referents. Thai groups omitted articles more with more than with less salient referents. The results corroborate previous offline data suggestive of the salience effect for L2 users from article-less L1 backgrounds, but point against the view that this is due to the redundancy of definiteness marking. The results seem better explained by persistent grammatical competition between L1 and L2 structures, consistent with the view that language systems within a bilingual mind cannot be kept fully apart.

Keywords

referent saliencesecond language articlesThaiFrenchEnglish
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , January 2013 , pp. 152 - 166
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

The research reported in this paper was supported by the Thai–UK Collaborative Research Network Scholarship to the second author. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Information Structure Lecture Series at the Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen, the RCEAL Colloquia Series at the University of Cambridge, the conference on Models of Interaction in Bilinguals in Bangor, EUROSLA 18 in Aix-en-Provence, and the ISB7 in Utrecht. We thank the audiences at these meetings for their insightful and valuable comments which have shaped this paper. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their thorough and constructive comments and suggestions.

References

Abutalebi, J., & Green, D. W. (2007). Bilingual language production: The neurocognition of language representation and control. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 20 (3), 242–275.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Allan, D. (2004). The Oxford Placement Test. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Almor, A. (1999). Noun-phrase anaphora and focus: The informational load hypothesis. Psychological Review, 106 (4), 748–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Almor, A. (2000). Constraints and mechanisms in theories of anaphor processing. In Pickering, M., Clifton, C. & Crocker, M. (eds.), Architectures and mechanisms for language processing, pp. 341–354. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Almor, A. (2005). A computational investigation of reference: Bridging the product and action traditions. In Trueswell, J. C. & Tanenhaus, M. K. (eds.), Approaches to studying world-situated language use: Bridging the language-as-product and language-as-action traditions, pp. 285–301. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Almor, A., & Nair, V. A. (2007). The form of referential expressions in discourse. Language and Linguistic Compass, 1 (5), 84–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ariel, M. (1990). Accessing noun-phrase antecedents. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Avery, P., & Radišić, M. (2007). Residual optionality at the interface: The L2 acquisition of articles. Presented at the EUROSLA 2007, Newcastle, UK.Google Scholar
Baddeley, A. (1990). Human memory. London: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Baddeley, A., & Hitch, G. (1974). Working memory. In Bower, G. H. (ed.), The psychology of learning and motivation: Advances in research and theory (vol. 8), pp. 47–89. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Brown, R. (1973). A first language. London: George Allen and Unwin.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chafe, W. (1976). Giveness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics, and point of view. In Li, C. N. (ed.), Subject and topic, pp. 25–55. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Chiarcos, C. (2011). The mental salience framework: Context-adequate generation of referring expressions. In Chiarcos, C., Claus, B. & Garbsky, M. (eds.), Salience: Multidisciplinary perspectives on its function in discourse, pp. 105–142. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Costa, A., Miozzo, M., & Caramazza, A. (1999). Lexical selection in bilinguals: Do words in the bilingual's two lexicons compete for selection? Journal of Memory and Language, 50 (4), 491–511.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
de Lange, J. (2008). Article omissions in headlines and child language: A processing approach. Utrecht: LOT.Google Scholar
Diderichsen, P. (2001). Visual fixations, attentional detection, and syntactic perspective. Working Paper, 84 (Lund University Cognitive Science Series).Google Scholar
Fillmore, C. J. (1977.) Topics in lexical semantics. In Cole, R. W. (ed.), Current issues in linguistic theory, pp. 76–138. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
García Mayo, M. P., & Hawkins, R. (eds.). (2009). Second language acquisition of articles: Empirical findings and theoretical implications. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Givón, T. (1989). Mind, code and context: Essays in pragmatics. London: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Goad, H., & White, L. (2004). Ultimate attainment of L2 inflections: Effects of L1 prosodic structure. In Foster-Cohen, S., Ota, M., Sharwood Smith, M. A. & Sorace, A., , A. (eds.), EUROSLA Yearbook (vol. 4), pp. 119–145. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Gordon, P. C., Grosz, B. J., & Gilliom, L. A. (1993). Pronouns, names, and the centering or attention in discourse. Cognitive Science, 17 (3), 311–347.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Green, D. (1998). Mental control of the bilingual lexico-semantic system. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1 (2), 67–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In Cole, P. & Morgan, J. (eds.), Speech acts (Syntax and Semantics 3), pp. 41–58. New York: Academic Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grosjean, F. (2001). The bilingual's language modes. In Nicol, J. L. (ed.), One mind, two languages, pp. 1–22. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Gundel, J. K., Hedberg, N., & Zacharski, R. (1993). Cognitive status and the forms of referring expressions in discourse. Language, 69 (2), 274–307.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hakuta, I. (1976). A case study of a Japanese child learning English as a second language. Language Learning, 26 (2), 321–351.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hawkins, J. (2004). Efficiency and complexity in grammars. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hermans, D., Bongaerts, T., de Bot, K., & Schreuder, R. (1998). Producing words in a foreign language: Can speakers prevent interference from their first language? Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1 (3), 213–229.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huebner, T. (1983). A longitudinal analysis of the acquisition of English. Ann Arbor, MI: Karoma.Google Scholar
Ionin, T., Ko, H., & Wexler, K. (2004). Article semantics in L2 acquisition: The role of specificity. Language Acquisition, 12 (1), 3–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jackendoff, R. (1997). The architecture of the language faculty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Jarvis, S. (2002). Topic continuity in L2 English article use. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 24 (3), 387–418.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kaushanskaya, M., & Marian, V. (2007). Bilingual language processing and interference in bilinguals: Evidence from eye tracking and picture naming. Language Learning, 57 (1), 119–163.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keenan, E. O. (1976). On the universality of conversational implicatures. Language & Society, 5 (1), 67–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kilborn, K. (1989). Sentence processing in a second language: The timing of transfer. Language and Speech, 32 (1), 1–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kroll, J. F., & Stewart, E. (1994). Category interference in translation and picture naming: Evidence for asymmetric connections between bilingual memory representations. Journal of Memory and Language, 33 (2), 149–174.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lambrecht, K. (1994). Information structure and sentence form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Luk, Z. P., & Shirai, Y. (2009). Is the acquisition order of grammatical morphemes impervious to L1 knowledge? Evidence from the acquisition of plural -s, articles and possessive 's. Language Learning, 59 (4), 721–754.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Master, P. (1990). Teaching English articles as a binary system. TESOL Quarterly, 24 (3), 461–478.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Matin, E., Shao, K. C., & Boff, K. R. (1993). Saccadic overhead: Information-processing time with and without saccades. Perception & Psychophysics, 53 (4), 372–380.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
O'Grady, W. (2005). Syntactic carpentry: An emergentist approach to syntax. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum Associates.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ota, M., Hartsuiker, R. J., & Haywood, S. L. (2009). The KEY to the ROCK: Near-homophony in non-native visual word recognition. Cognition, 111 (2), 263–269.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pongpairoj, N. (2008). Variability in second language article production: A comparison of L1 Thai and L1 French learners of L2 English. Ph.D. dissertation, University of York.Google Scholar
Prince, E. (1981). Toward a taxonomy of given–new information. In Cole, P. (ed.), Radical pragmatics, pp. 223–255. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Ringbom, H. (1987). The role of the first language in foreign language learning. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Roberts, L., Gullberg, M., & Indefrey, P. (2008). Online pronoun resolution in L2 discourse: L1 influence and general learner effects. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 30 (3), 333–357.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robertson, D. (2000). Variability in the use of the English article system by Chinese learners of English. Second Language Research, 16 (2), 135–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sharma, D. (2005). Language transfer and discourse universals in Indian English article use. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 27 (4), 535–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sorace, A. (2005). Syntactic optionality at interfaces. In. Cornips, L. & Corrigan, K. (eds.), Syntax and variation: Reconciling the biological and the social, pp. 46–111. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Sorace, A., & Filiaci, F. (2006). Anaphora resolution in near-native speakers of Italian. Second Language Research, 22 (3), 339–368.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Styles, E. A. (1997). The psychology of attention. Hove: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Su, I.-R. (2001). Transfer of sentence processing strategies: A comparison of L2 learners of Chinese and English. Applied Psycholinguistics, 22 (1), 83–112.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tarone, E. (1985). Variability in interlanguage use: A study of style-shifting in morphology and syntax. Language Learning, 35 (3), 373–404.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thomas, M. (1989). The acquisition of English articles by first and second language learners. Applied Psycholinguistics, 10 (3), 335–355.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tomlin, R. (1995). Focal attention, voice, and word order: An experimental, cross-linguistic study. In Downing, P. & Noonan, M. (eds.), Word order in discourse, pp. 517–554. Dordrecht: Reidel.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tomlin, R. (1997). Mapping conceptual representations into linguistic representations: The role of attention in grammar. In Nuyts, J. & Pederson, E. (eds.), Language and conceptualization, pp. 162–89. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trenkic, D. (2002). Form–meaning connections in the acquisition of English articles. In Foster-Cohen, S., Ruthenberg, T. & Poschen, M. L. (eds.), EUROSLA Yearbook, pp. 115–33. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Trenkic, D. (2007). Variability in L2 article production: Beyond the representational deficit vs. processing constraints debate. Second Language Research, 23 (3), 289–327.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trenkic, D. (2008). The representation of English articles in second language grammars: Determiners or adjectives? Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 11 (3), 1–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trenkic, D. (2009). Accounting for patterns of article omissions and substitutions in second language production. In García Mayo, & Hawkins, (eds.), pp. 115–143.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Truscott, J., & Sharwood Smith, M. (2004). Acquisition by processing: A modular perspective on language development. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 7 (1), 1–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weber, A., & Cutler, A. (2006). First-language phonotactics in second-language listening. Journal of Acoustic Society of America, 119 (1), 597–607.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed