Winners of Languages Best Poster Award at EuroSLA 28

Dear Colleagues,

The Editorial team of Languages is happy to announce the winners of the Best Poster Award at EuroSLA 28, held in Münster (Germany) on 5–8 September 2018.

The award has been granted to Dr. Miho Mano (Naruto University of Education, Japan), Dr. Yuko Yoshinari (Gifu University, Japan), and Prof. Yo Matsumoto (National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, Japan), whose poster was titled Representation of Sequential Path of Motion in L2: L1 Influence, Simplification, and Entrenched Patterns. The abstract is available below.

The best poster was voted by the scientific committee of EuroSLA 28.

The authors have been awarded 250 CHF in recognition of the quality and scientific significance of the work presented in the conference. We congratulate them for their accomplishments.

Languages Editorial Office

Abstract: This experimental study on motion event descriptions will empirically show the sources of inter-language characteristics of sequential path descriptions based on the production data from L1/L2English and Japanese, which include L1 Influence, simplification, and entrenched patterns, through contrastive interlanguage analysis (CIA) (Granger 1996). Recent L2 studies (Cadierno 2004) have examined the L2 descriptions of motion events in learners whose L1 differs from their L2 in terms of the typology of motion event descriptions (cf. Talmy’s (1991) work), and they have typically focused on the L1 influence as well as simplification in learners’ language. However, there still remain some issues. One issue is a phenomenon ascribable to neither of the factors, which was identified in our previous study: non-temporal sequencing of path segments (e.g. The dog ran into a cage from a soccer goal) rather than a temporal one (e.g. The dog ran from a soccer goal to a cage) found in English as an L2 used by Japanese speakers. In order to further examine this phenomenon, we analyzed production data from 12 Japanese-speaking learners of English (E-L2(j)) and 10 English-speaking learners of Japanese (J-L2(e)), as well as 15 English and Japanese L1 speakers (E-L1, J-L1), using a different set of video clips depicting more complex sequences of path segments than in our previous study. This experimental method ensured comparability of the data from different language speakers and allowed us a 4-way comparison. The results show phenomena suggesting L1 influence (choice of verb types) and simplification (simpler path phrases) in both learner languages, but they also revealed the E-L2(j) speakers’ frequent use of non-temporal sequencing (50.0%), which was far more common than in E-L1 (4.5%) or J-L1/J-L2(e) speakers (0%), who prefer temporal sequencing. We argue that this is due to learners’ own rule preferring the entrenched combination of verb and goal sequence in English. The difference between E-L2(j) and J-L2(e) is explained by the different word orders of the target languages. The role of entrenchment pattern is also discussed through learners’ written corpus data by using JEFLL corpus. This study also confirms the effectiveness of CIA in SLA studies.