心理语言学线上论坛 | 2022年11月2日16:00 Dora Alexopoulou 教授讲座

Speaker: Dora Alexopoulou

Title: The role of the linguistic distance between mother-tongue (L1) and second language (L2) in L2 acquisition: evidence from big learner corpora

Time: 16:00 – 17:30, 2 Nov 2022 

           (Beijing, Hong Kong time)

Venue: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/779556638

            https://cuhk.zoom.cn/j/779556638

The role of the linguistic distance between mother-tongue (L1) and second language (L2) in L2 acquisition: evidence from big learner corpora

Dora Alexopoulou, PhD

University of Cambridge, UK

Everyone can learn a language, young or old, educated or not. It can happen in many different ways: taking a foreign language course, migrating to a new country for work or study, or growing up in a multilingual community. In any of these contexts, most learners will make fast progress and use their new language effectively to communicate. Yet, all learners will find some aspects of grammar challenging and will make grammatical errors. Many of these challenges are due to the way prior linguistic knowledge shapes the way learners approach the acquisition of their second language. For example, the acquisition of English morphemes like the article or tense marking is facilitated by the availability of congruent items in the L1 (Murakami & Alexopoulou, 2016). Importantly, there is compelling evidence that the linguistic distance between L1 and an additional language can influence broad acquisition outcomes; for example, the linguistic distance between L1 and L3 Dutch, measured through a variety of lexical, morphological, and phonological features, can predict attainment in the latter (Schepens, van Hout, & Jaeger, 2020). The use of big data from assessment and teaching organisations is a crucial element in the investigation of L1 typological effects on L2 learnability as they enable empirical studies with a wide range of typologically diverse languages. In this talk, I will present two empirical studies showing that linguistic distance can influence not only broad outcomes, but also the acquisition of individual structures, specifically the acquisition of the L2 English article and complex syntactic structures like relative clauses. I will then connect the linguistic distance effects to the more general way in which the learners’ prior linguistic knowledge shapes their L2 learning. Specifically, I will explain how L2 learners prioritise lexical meaning over grammatical forms, e.g. ‘car’ in ‘the cars’, as such meaning can be relatively straightforwardly mapped to existing concepts and help comprehension. As a result, grammatical elements like the English article ‘the’, which does not have transparent meaning, can be problematic. The learners’ attention to lexical meaning over forms combined with their reliance on their L1 grammar to process L2 structure and forms can help us understand why the degree of similarity or linguistic distance between the L1 and L2 can facilitate or impede learning.

References 

Murakami, A., & Alexopoulou, T. (2016). L1 influence on the acquisition order of English grammatical morphemes: A learner corpus study. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 38(3), 365–401. doi: M10.1017/S02722631150003521 

Schepens, J., van Hout, R., & Jaeger, T. F. (2020). Big data suggest strong constraints of linguistic similarity on adult language learning. Cognition, 194, 104056. Retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001002771930229X 

doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2019.104056

About the Speaker 

Dr Alexopoulou’s interests are in second language acquisition, linguistic theory, and theoretical and experimental syntax. She currently focuses on combining linguistic and computational modeling of learner trajectories in big learner corpora. Current research topics: linguistic typology and learnability in L2, input processing instruction, child L2 acquisition, linguistic complexity in L2 development. 

Dr Alexopoulou is one of the people who set up and run the Cambridge Bilingualism Network, a public engagement initiative promoting the linguistic and cognitive advantages of bilingualism. She is also the founding Editor of Languages, Society and Policy (LSP), a journal aiming to connect research in linguistics and languages with policy making. She is the PI of  EF Research Lab for Applied Language Learning and recently gave a talk at TED x Cambridge University on Multilingualism.