Languages — Open Access Journal

This paper provides a critical review of the state of the art in code-switching research being conducted in linguistics. Three issues of theoretical and practical importance are explored: (a) code-switching vs. borrowing; (b) grammaticality; and (c) variability vs. uniformity, and I take a position on all three issues. Regarding switching vs. borrowing, I argue that not all lone other-language items are borrowings once more subtle measures of integration are used. I defend the use of empirical data to compare competing theoretical frameworks of grammaticality, and I exemplify quantitative research on variability in code-switching, showing that it also reveals uniformity and the possible influence of community norms. I conclude that more research is needed on a range of bilingual communities in order to determine the relative contribution of individual factors, processing and community norms to the variability and uniformity of code-switching. Full article

In an exploration of solutions to improve Chinese second language learners’ listening comprehension, this quantitative quasi-experimental study examines the effects of metacognitive strategy training (MST) on learners’ metacognitive awareness, listening performance, and proficiency in an intensive language training program. In contrast with the extant research, this study designed a metacognitive learning cycle model, including self-diagnosis, planning, monitoring, evaluation, regulation, and reflection strategies, as the content of the MST. Six classes, comprised of a total of 80 participants, were assigned into three groups: Self-directed, teacher-led, and control groups. The Metacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire and a listening comprehension test were administered as pre- and post-tests, in addition to a proficiency test as a post-test only. Results demonstrate no significant differences in metacognitive awareness development, listening performance gains, and proficiency test results among the three groups. The results do indicate that the self-directed MST better enhances development of students’ planning and evaluation awareness, and teacher-led MST workshops with special emphasis on the area of monitoring strategy will help students raise awareness. The findings of this study reveal that insufficient training time and MST without the integration of cognitive strategies do not yield significant effects. It is suggested that future MSTs should involve sufficient training time and effective follow-ups to ensure its positive effects. This study proposes that the effectiveness of MST could be improved by combining it with cognitive strategies training. Full article

This study investigates native English CFL (Chinese as a Foreign Language) learners’ difficulties with Mandarin consonants at the initial stage of learning and explores the relationship between second language (L2) speech perception and production. Twenty-five native English CFL learners read the eight Mandarin consonants (j/tɕ/, q /tɕʰ/, x /ɕ/, zh /tʂ/, ch /tʂʰ/, sh /ʂ/, z /ts/, and c /tsʰ/) in sentences and identified the target sounds in a forced-choice identification task. Native Mandarin listeners identified the consonants produced by the learners and rated the quality of each sound they identified along a scale of 1 (poor) to 7 (good). The learners’ mean percentage accuracy scores ranged from 29% to 80% for perception and 25% to 88% for production. Moderate correlations between the perception and production scores were found for two of the eight target sounds. The Mandarin retroflex, palatal, and dental fricatives and affricates, though all lack counterparts in English, pose different problems to the English CFL learners. The misperceived retroflex and palatal sounds were substituted with each other in perception but mis-produced palatal sounds were substituted with each other, not with retroflex sounds. The relationship between perception and production of L2 consonants is not straightforward. The findings are discussed in terms of current speech learning models. Full article

Studies of bilingual speech production suggest that different executive functions (EFs) contribute to the cognitive control of language production. However, no study has simultaneously examined the relationship between different EFs and language control during online speech production. The current study examined individual differences in three EFs (working memory updating, inhibitory control, and task-set switching) and their relationship with performance in a trilingual language-switching task for a group of forty-seven native English (L1) speakers learning French (L2) and Spanish (L3). Analyses indicate complex interactions between EFs and language switching: better inhibitory control was related to smaller L1 switch costs, whereas better working memory was related to larger L1 switch costs. Working memory was also related to larger L2 switch costs, but only when switching from L1. These results support theories of cognitive control that implicate both global and local control mechanisms, and suggest unique contributions of each EF to both global and local cognitive control during language switching. Finally, we discuss the implications for theories of multilingual language control. Full article

Studies have found that aspects of grammar that lie at the syntax–pragmatics interface, such as the use of pronominal subjects in null-subject languages, are likely to undergo cross-linguistic influence in bilingual speakers. This study contributes to our understanding of the role of Spanish immersion academic instruction on the comprehension of null subjects in English-dominant, Spanish-heritage children living in the United States. Two groups of bilingual children aged 4 to 7 (those attending a Spanish immersion school and those not) completed an acceptability judgment task in both English and Spanish. English monolingual children and monolingually raised Spanish children of the same ages also completed the task in their respective languages. The findings revealed that children in the Spanish immersion school performed on par with their monolingual peers in Spanish, but accepted significantly more ungrammatical null subjects in English than the other groups. These results suggest that immersion schooling plays a role in extending the English null subject stage in bilingual children due to competing input and cross-linguistic influence. Full article

Within the framework of explicit learning and consciousness-raising, this study investigates patterns in the use of -le in authentic classroom tasks by beginner-level learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL). It also explores the role and the processes of student-centered consciousness-raising in explicit knowledge building. Twenty-five participants completed a grammaticality judgment task, an interactive role-play task, and a written editing task. The experiment group received role-play sheets with explicit forms of -le provided, and participants engaged in rule induction of -le in forbidden context in the role-play session. Results showed that beginner-level learners’ difficulty with -le use manifested in different ways in these tasks, and -le underuse occurred more than overuse in the control group’s oral role-play task. Consciousness-raising through unguided small group rule induction supported participants’ learning of -le usage constraints, shown by differences between the control and experiment groups’ performances in the posttest. Through a qualitative analysis of participants’ analytical talk transcripts, the processes and outcomes of small group rule induction are examined and discussed. Full article

This study investigates the second dialect production of Bogota Spanish /s/ in coda position by speakers of three different varieties of Colombian Spanish, who have been in contact in Ciudad Bolivar, a community located in Bogota, Colombia. The study has three aims. First, it will examine the role of phonetic distance in the acquisition of /s/ production. Second, it will determine the linguistic factors that constrain the realization of /s/ sound by the speakers of the three varieties studied. Third, it will look into the role of extralinguistic factors in the production of /s/. A total of 2322 tokens extracted from sociolinguistic interviews with 50 participants were acoustically analyzed in PRAAT. Statistical analyses were conducted using GoldVarb. The results showed the highest rate of [s] was produced by the speakers of the Eastern Andean variety, followed by the Western Andean, and then by the Coastal variety, suggesting that first dialect phonological processes may affect the acquisition of second dialect sounds. Consistent with previous studies that have examined /s/ variation and change, the linguistic factors position in the word, following segment, and syllable stress were also predictors of /s/ in second dialect production. The extralinguistic factors of age of arrival, age, and gender also had a significant effect on /s/ production in this study. Implications are discussed for models of second dialect speech learning. Full article

The acquisition of appropriate linguistic markers of information structure (IS), e.g., word order and specific lexical and syntactic constructions, is a rather late development. This study revisits the debate on language-general preferred word order in IS and examines the use of language-specific means to encode IS in Mandarin Chinese. An elicited production study of conjunct noun phrases (NPs) of new and old referents was conducted with native Mandarin-speaking children (N = 24, mean age 4;6) and adults (N = 25, mean age 26). (The age of children is conventionally notated as years;months). The result shows that adults differ significantly from children in preferring the “old-before-new” word order. This corroborates prior findings in other languages (e.g., German, English, Arabic) that adults prefer a language-general “old-before-new” IS, whereas children disprefer or show no preference for that order. Despite different word order preferences, Mandarin-speaking children and adults resemble each other in the lexical and syntactic forms to encode old and new referents: bare NPs dominate the conjunct NPs, and indefinite classifier NPs are used for both the old and the new referents, but when only one classifier phrase is produced, it is predominantly used to refer to the new referents, which suggests children’s early sensitivity to language-specific syntactic devices to mark IS. Full article

Vocabulary plays a key role in speech production, affecting multiple stages of language processing. This pilot study investigates the relationships between second language (L2) learners’ lexical access and their speaking fluency, speaking accuracy, and speaking complexity. Fifteen L2 learners of Chinese participated in the experiment. A task-specific, native-referenced vocabulary test was used to measure learners’ vocabulary size and lexical retrieval speed. Learners’ speaking performance was measured by thirteen variables. The results showed that lexical access was significantly correlated with learners’ speech rate, lexical accuracy, syntactic accuracy, and lexical complexity. Vocabulary size and lexical retrieval speed were significant predictors of speech rate. However, vocabulary size and lexical retrieval speed each affected learners’ speaking performance differently. Learners’ speaking fluency, accuracy, and complexity were all affected by vocabulary size. No significant correlation was found between lexical retrieval speed and syntactic complexity. Findings in this study support the Model of Bilingual Speech Production, revealing the significant role lexical access plays in L2 speech production. Full article

This article provides initial evidence that the head K, which may spell out as case morphology, drives the operations of concord within the noun phrase. Evidence for this claim comes from three code-switching varieties: Basque/Spanish, German/Turkish and Russian/Kazakh. By placing the switch at the border between case morphology and the rest of the noun phrase the properties of K can be isolated and inspected. We find that if K is drawn from the lexicon of a non-concord language, constituents within the noun phrase adopt a default morphology. It is suggested that the data presented in this paper provide evidence for approaches that take Concord to be a form of Agree (probe, goal) and against an approach that takes it to be the result of feature percolation from the bottom up. An analysis of default morphology is proposed that argues that default forms are inserted as vocabulary items in syntactic terminals that, as a result of a failure of Agree, are populated with unvalued features. Full article

This study examines the processing of two putatively problematic intra-sentential code-switching configurations, following subject pronouns and interrogatives, in a bilingual speech community in which there are no confounding grammatical differences. The languages are Ecuadoran Quichua and the mixed language known as Media Lengua, consisting of the entire Quichua morphosyntactic system but with all lexical roots replaced by their Spanish counterparts. In eye-tracking processing experiments utilizing the visual world paradigm with auditorily presented stimuli, Quichua–Media Lengua bilinguals identified the languages more quickly after pronouns and interrogatives than after lexical items, while acknowledgement of code-switches after pronouns and interrogatives was delayed in comparison with switches following lexical items. The facilitation effect of pronouns and interrogatives evidently provokes a surprise reaction when they are immediately followed by items from another language, and this relative delay may play a role in the low acceptability of code-switched utterances that otherwise violate no grammatical constraints. Full article

Multilingualism and linguistic diversity are the norm in India. Although studies have shown a relation between bilingualism and cognitive gains, linguistic diversity has so far been ignored as a potential factor affecting cognitive skills. This study aims to fill this gap by examining how cognitive skills—as measured by the n-back and Raven’s Colored Progressive Matrices tasks—are affected by multilingualism and/or sociolinguistic diversity in a large cohort of socioeconomically disadvantaged primary school children in two urban sites of India: Delhi and Hyderabad. We present a questionnaire estimating sociolinguistic diversity and show that this measure assesses a distinct construct, as compared to a child’s multilingualism. Children were classified as growing up monolingually or bilingually, depending on whether they grew up with one or more languages in the home. Regarding cognitive performance, bilinguals were found to outperform monolinguals on the n-back task, as well as on the Raven’s task. In addition, a socially and linguistically diverse environment seems to enhance cognitive performance for children who are not multilingual themselves. Finally, several contextual factors such as city were found to influence cognitive performance. Overall, this shows that cognitive tasks are subject to contextual effects and that bilingualism and linguistic diversity can enhance cognitive performance of children in disadvantaged contexts. Full article

This paper takes a well-known observation as its starting point, that is, languages vary with respect to headedness, with the standard head-initial and head-final types well attested. Is there a connection between headedness and the size of a lexical class? Although this question seems quite straightforward, there are formidable methodological and theoretical challenges in addressing it. Building on initial results by several researchers, we refine our methodology and consider the proportion of nouns to simplex verbs (as opposed to light verb constructions) in a varied sample of 33 languages to evaluate the connection between headedness and the size of a lexical class. We demonstrate a robust correlation between this proportion and headedness. While the proportion of nouns in a lexicon is relatively stable, head-final/object-verb (OV)-type languages (e.g., Japanese or Hungarian) have a relatively small number of simplex verbs, whereas head-initial/verb-initial languages (e.g., Irish or Zapotec) have a considerably larger percentage of such verbs. The difference between the head-final and head-initial type is statistically significant. We, then, consider a subset of languages characterized as subject-verb-object (SVO) and show that this group is not uniform. Those SVO languages that have strong head-initial characteristics (as shown by the order of constituents in a set of phrases and word order alternations) are characterized by a relatively large proportion of lexical verbs. SVO languages that have strong head-final traits (e.g., Mandarin Chinese) pattern with head-final languages, and a small subset of SVO languages are genuinely in the middle (e.g., English, Russian). We offer a tentative explanation for this headedness asymmetry, couched in terms of informativity and parsing principles, and discuss additional evidence in support of our account. All told, the fewer simplex verbs in head-final/OV-type languages is an adaptation in response to their particular pattern of headedness. The object-verb/verb-object (OV/VO) difference with respect to noun/verb ratios also reveals itself in SVO languages; some languages, Chinese and Latin among them, show a strongly OV ratio, whereas others, such as Romance or Bantu, are VO-like in their noun/verb ratios. The proportion of nouns to verbs thus emerges as a new linguistic characteristic that is correlated with headedness. Full article

The ability to discriminate phonetically similar first language (L1) and second language (L2) sounds has significant consequences for achieving target-like proficiency in second-language learners. This study examines the L2 perception of Spanish approximants [β, δ, ɣ] in comparison with their voiced stop counterparts [b, d, g] by adult English-Spanish bilinguals. Of interest is how perceptual effects are modulated by factors related to language dominance, including proficiency, language history, attitudes, and L1/L2 use, as measured by the Bilingual Language Profile questionnaire. Perception of target phones was assessed in adult native Spanish speakers (n = 10) and Spanish learners (n = 23) of varying proficiency levels, via (vowel-consonant-vowel) VCV sequences featuring both Spanish approximants and voiced stops during an AX discrimination task. Results indicate a significant positive correlation between perceptual accuracy and a language dominance score. Findings further demonstrate a significant hierarchy of increasing perceptual difficulty: β < δ < ɣ. Through an examination of bilingual language dominance, composed of the combined effects of language history, use, proficiency, and attitudes, the present study contributes a more nuanced and complete examination of individual variables that affect L2 perception, reaching beyond proficiency and experience alone. Full article

The present article suggests that the figurative meanings of English phrasal verbs can be interpreted by means of image schemas. It is argued that image schemas reflect bodily experiences which constitute configurations of spatial perception. The article classifies image schemas and draws examples from English phrasal verbs. The article discusses how the semantics of the particle (which prototypically denotes space and motion) encourages various types of image schemas which can be extended into more abstract and metaphoric readings. The article investigates how English phrasal verbs of the form take plus particles encourage the image schemas of containment, the journey and its component parts, goal, path, proximity-distance, linkage-separation, front-back orientation, part-whole relationship and linear order. The article also argues for image schematic transformations. Full article

In this article, I put forward a linguistic analysis model for analyzing meaning which is based on a methodology that falls within the wider framework of the digital humanities and is equipped with digital tools that meet the theoretical requirements stated. First, I propose a conception of the digital humanities which favors a close relationship between digital technology and the humanities. This general framework will justify the use of a number of models embodied in a dynamic conception of language. This dynamism will then be reflected in the choice of metrics and textual analysis tools (developed in the field of textometry, especially the Iramuteq software). The semantic functioning of linguistic units will be described by using these tools within the identified methodological framework and will help to better understand the processes of variations, whether temporal or generic, within vast discursive corpora. I propose a way of analyzing corpora with specific tools, confronting the humanities with computing/numerical technology. Full article

The analysis of the linguistic distance between dialect varieties and the standard variety typically focuses on establishing the influence exerted by the standard norm on the dialects. In languages whose standard form was established and implemented well after the beginning of the last century, however, such as Galician, it is still possible to perform studies from other perspectives. Unlike other languages, standard Galician was not based on a single dialect but aspired instead to be supradialectal in nature. In the present study, the tools and methods of quantitative dialectology are brought to bear in the task of establishing the extent to which dialect varieties of Galician resemble or differ from the standard variety. Moreover, the results of the analysis underline the importance of the different dialects in the evaluation of the supradialectal aim, as established by the makers of the standard variety. Full article