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One of the most researched challenges in learning Spanish is the acquisition and use of the past aspect, namely, the preterit and imperfect. L2 learners encounter this challenge due to differences in how native English and Spanish speakers view past events. Numerous studies on the Spanish past aspect have analyzed L2 learners’ past aspectual selections through two hypotheses: the lexical aspect hypothesis (LAH), which claims that lower-level L2 learners are guided by the lexical semantics of the verb in their selections of past aspect; and the discourse hypothesis (DH), which claims that as L2 learners become more proficient, they make past aspectual selections to foreground and background information. The present study uses both hypotheses to analyze past aspectual selections in beginner, intermediate, and advanced L2 learners as well as native speakers. By doing so, it was possible to analyze how past aspectual selections differ across proficiency levels on the basis of lexical aspect and narrative grounding. 75 L2 learners and 20 native Spanish speakers produced two uncontrolled, written narratives. The first was a film-retell based on a five minute clip of “Alone and Hungry” from Modern Times and the second was a personal narration of a favorite vacation. All verbs within each narrative were coded for lexical aspect: atelic states and activities as well as telic accomplishments and achievements. Next, foregrounded clauses (preterit) were separated from backgrounded clauses (imperfect) in order to capture how narrative structure played a role in past aspectual selections. The researcher and a second coder determined the accuracy of use of the preterit and imperfect. Quantitative data consisted of contingency tables and chi-square analyses for the film-retell task and the personal narrative task separately that captured total use of preterit and imperfect morphology for the LAH. It also captured correct use of preterit and imperfect for the DH. Finally, type-token ratios (TTRs) were used to assess the lexical variety of verbs on the basis of grammatical aspect, lexical aspect, and proficiency level for the fill-retell task. The results revealed that for the film-retell and personal narrative tasks, there was support for the LAH. Participants across proficiency groups were guided by the LAH when making past aspectual selections. There was also partial support for the DH in that participants across proficiency groups consistently selected preterit morphology for atelic states and activities, even if the lower-level proficiency groups made more errors in their past aspectual selections. However, showed very little evidence of correct use of imperfect morphology with telic achievements and accomplishments. Additionally, analysis of type-token ratios (TTRs) showed that participants across proficiency groups repeatedly used high-frequency verbs to complete their narratives. This was particularly noticeable for state and activity verbs within the beginner group. Task type appeared to be a major influence in participants’ selections of past aspect for the film-retell task. Participants were influenced by the numerous sequential scenes of the film task, which accounted for the high frequencies of preterit to mark bounded events, but much lower frequencies of imperfect to mark unbounded events. For the personal narrative, frequencies of the preterit were higher than imperfect across each lexical class. When assessing both film-retell and personal narratives, participants produced very few contexts for imperfect with achievement and accomplishment verbs. Participants either did not have the knowledge to do so or felt that their own narrations of “Alone and Hungry” and their personal narrative was sufficient to complete the task. / Spanish

This study examines the effects of speech style, syllable stress, and proficiency level on the production of the second-language (L2) Spanish vowels /e/ and /o/. The study addresses traditional descriptions of L2 Spanish (e.g. Stockwell & Bowen, 1965), which claim that English-speaking learners, unlike native speakers (NSs), reduce vowels in unstressed syllables and diphthongize /e/ and /o/ in stressed syllables. Additionally, it adds to previous research by investigating how speech style affects L2 Spanish vowels, how these effects change by course level, and how they compare to NS style-shifting. Data was gathered from 55 adult learners of Spanish (SLs) at three course levels, as well as 10 NSs of Spanish using two elicitation tasks at different levels of formality. A total of 7,740 word-medial tokens of /e/ and /o/ was extracted, and vowels' F1, F2, duration, and diphthongization were measured using Praat. ANOVA tests were run to determine the main and interaction effects of participant group, elicitation task, and syllable stress on these four response variables for each vowel. Significant main effects as well as interaction effects were found for group, task, and stress on the F1 and F2 of /e/ and /o/, as well as interaction effects, providing evidence that the SLs and NSs centralized their unstressed vowels, that /e/ and /o/ became more raised and peripheral as course level increased, and that the SLs at all levels peripheralized their vowels in formal speech. / Master of Arts

J. R. Stroop' s landmark 1935 article about interference in color naming is often used to study bilingualism. Despite the vast amount of research regarding the Stroop effect and bilinguals, a number of issues are still under debate. This research attempts to further the investigation of the Stroop effect by looking at English speakers at various levels of learning German. Specifically, the pattern of interference for beginners, intermediates, and advanced German learners was examined. As expected, it was found that regardless of proficiency level, interference occurred in the monolingual English and German conditions, but interference was more robust in the English monolingual condition. Between languages interference was also observed. The results provide support for Magiste's ( 1984, 1985) language proficiency hypothesis.

This study investigates the acquisition of Chinese connectives by second language learners under the theoretical framework of usage-based theory. Language is not a random set of words and phrases, but rather a coherent and cohesive set of utterances. As such, learning a second language (L2) entails, among other processes, learners’ development of employing cohesive devices to construct a coherent discourse in their target language. One type of cohesive devices frequently used by L2 learners is connectives. In Chinese, connectives are utilized to denote various semantic relationships between the clauses in a compound sentence. Due to their flexibility and complexity in nature, Chinese connectives present a huge challenge to L2 learners’ learning. However, to date no study has been set up to explore the learners’ development of Chinese connectives within L2 Chinese research community. This study aims to fill this gap in the literature and build an L2 acquisitional model of Chinese connectives under the theoretical framework of Constructionist Usage-based Theory. Constructionist Usage-based Theory maintains that the basic unit of language is constructions and that the syntactic and lexical form of constructions and its corresponding semantic and discourse functions are conventionalized in language usage. According to these notions, language learning is believed to be driven by the factors grounded in the form and function of constructions in language usage. This study specifically examines how the factors of frequency, form, function, contingency (interaction of form and function), and L1-tuned attention affect L2 Chinese learners’ development of Chinese connectives. Furthermore, the study investigates the learners’ knowledge about the distribution of Chinese connectives across different proficiency levels. Specifically, this study aims to address four research questions: (1) what is the relationship between L2 learners’ proficiency level and language background and the acquisition of Chinese connectives?; (2) do L2 learners overuse or underuse Chinese connectives in constructing responses when the other in a pair is given and what errors do L2 learners make when using Chinese connectives?; (3) how can 12 target pairs of Chinese connectives be categorized into (hierarchical) groups based on L2 Chinese learners’ performance?; and (4) how do theoretically-motivated models represent the factorial structure underlying L2 acquisition of Chinese connectives? To address the four research questions, this study elicited L2 Chinese learners’ performance in two tests: a mini-discourse completion test and a form-function association test. In the mini-discourse completion test, learners were required to supply a missing clause to complete a three-clause discourse in which one of paired connectives was embedded; in the form-function association test, learners were asked to choose options of paired connectives to link two given clauses where connectives were omitted. Results showed that the development of all Chinese paired connectives was positively correlated to L2 learners’ L2 proficiency level. Learners with heritage language background seemed to have an advantage over less frequent and less prototypical connectives. Predominantly, L2 learners underused Chinese connectives, resulting from the cross-linguistic influence of disparity between English and Chinese connectives at the structural level in particular and between English and Chinese textual cohesion at the discourse level in general. Based on L2 learners’ performances in the two tests, the 12 pairs of Chinese connectives were classifier into four hierarchical groups. Confirmatory factor analyses showed that the usage-based factors (i.e., frequency, co-occurrence strength, formulaicity, prototypicality, contingency, and L1-tuned attention) jointly determined the L2 acquisition and development of Chinese connectives in a complex, adaptive, dynamic manner. Summarizing these findings, this study proposed a usage-based acquisitional model of L2 Chinese connectives, providing theoretical contributions to the usage-based theory and pedagogical implications for Chinese connectives.

Lexical bundles (fixed sequences of three to four words) have been described as building blocks of discourse, both written and spoken (Biber & Barbieri, 2007), and as a useful mechanical device for creating writing that is suited for its academic field (Hyland, 2008). Having noticed that the academic theses of my students at Longdong University in Qingyang, China seemed very different from professional writing in their fields, I created a thesis project that addressed the question of how professionals in their fields were using bundles and how the learners' use of these bundles in terms of frequency, structure, and function varied from the professionals' use. In order to answer this question, I compiled four corpora of writing in literature and applied linguistics, representing professional and learner writing in each field. I used concordancing software in order to identify four-word lexical bundles that occurred at least 20 times per 100,000 words and over a range of four texts. I then did a three-part analysis which looked at frequency, structure, and function of these bundles. The results of the study reveal that professionals in applied linguistics and literature use bundles with different frequency, display different choices of lexical items to fill structural bundles, and use functional bundles differently. These differences seem to reflect the rhetorical needs of each discipline. Further, the learners in each field displayed differences in their use of bundles as compared to the professionals' use. Learners in applied linguistics used more types and tokens of bundles overall, while learners in literature used fewer. Both groups of learners relied more on repetitive use of certain bundles than did the professionals. Implications of this study are discussed for teaching and curriculum development. The findings can be applied to teaching through creating awareness-raising and guided practice opportunities for the students to see how bundles are used in professional writing and to help them apply this understanding to their own writing.

Research has focused on how the effects of different types of feedback vary as a function of the complexity of the linguistic targets and on the learning of inflectional features. However, few studies have investigated the learning of rule-based verb constructions. Grounded in the interactionist approach and usage-based theory, this study investigated the effects of corrective feedback on the acquisition of rule-based verb constructions among English-speaking learners of Chinese. Specifically, this study examined the effects of input-providing feedback and output-prompting feedback on the learning of two verb constructions. Data were drawn from 18 learners of Chinese from second-year Chinese classes in an American university. The participants were divided into two groups and took a pretest, treatment, and two posttests. Learners also filled out a questionnaire about their perception and preference of feedback types. Contrary to previous research, results indicated that both recasts and metalinguistic clues had positive effects on learners' learning of the target constructions. Moreover, learners of different proficiency preferred different types of feedback. The study results provided a categorization of verb constructions into four classes based on the rules that govern their formations and constraints that work on the constructions and identified stages learners moved through when learning verb constructions. The researcher proposed an instructional model of rule-based verb constructions. The model will help instructors recognize the stage the learners' are in and provide insight into how to help learners move to a higher stage by providing instruction, corrective feedback, and practice activities.

This dissertation investigates second language (L2) development in the domains of morphosyntax and semantics. Specifically, it examines the acquisition of definiteness and specificity in Russian within the Feature Re-assembly framework (Lardiere, 2009), according to which the hardest L2 learning task is not to reset parameters but to reconfigure, or remap features from the way they are assembled in the L1 into new formal configurations in the L2. Within the Feature Re-assembly approach, it has been argued that re-assembling features that are represented overtly in the L1 and mapping them onto those that are encoded covertly by context in the L2 will present a greater difficulty than re-assembling features in the opposite direction (Slabakova, 2009). This dissertation examines the acquisition of four linguistic properties (types of modifiers, word order, indefinite determiners and case marking) that encode definiteness and specificity overtly or covertly in L2 Russian by English and Korean speakers. The native languages of the learners were chosen specifically in order to test various overt-covert mappings. The data obtained from two experimental tasks (grammaticality and felicity judgments) completed by 56 Russian native speaker controls, 51 English- and 53 Korean-speaking learners support Slabakova's prediction that overt-to-covert realization of the feature is more challenging than covert-to-overt realization. In addition, the findings uncovered other important factors facilitating or impeding acquisition, such as the nature of the form-to-meaning mapping (one-to-one or one-to-many) and the availability of clear, unambiguous evidence for a certain mapping in the input available to learners. Results also reveal that the presence or absence of the L1 transfer depends on the overt/covert status of the feature in the L2. That is, when the feature is marked overtly in both the L1 and L2, L1 transfer has facilitative effect on the acquisition of the feature. On the contrary, when the feature is marked covertly in both the L1 and L2, L1 transfer has no or negative effects. These findings provide new insights into the effects of the native language on L2 learnability and enable us to come to a more precise and fine-grained understanding of grammatical meaning acquisition in the second language.

It has long been theorized that, after the so-called critical period has passed, acquiring language becomes a more difficult enterprise. While general differences between adult second language (L2) learners and normally developed child (L1) acquirers have been more or less empirically established, a strand of recent L2 accounts have focused on the specific locus of these differences. The main goal of this dissertation project is to test the predictions of one such account: Clahsen and Felser's Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH; Clahsen & Felser 2006a, 2006b). The SSH places emphasis on the empirical testing of native/non-native language processing asymmetries, which are argued to be due to less detailed L2 grammatical representations. This dissertation tests the predictions of the SSH using a long-distance dependency: Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD) in L2 Spanish. The study includes on-line and an off-line tasks, which were completed by a control group of native speakers of Spanish and an experimental group constituted by L2 learners of Spanish whose first language was English. In view of the well-known fact that L2 learning outcomes vary widely across individuals, a secondary goal of this dissertation project is to determine whether variability in individual learning abilities, such as inhibitory control and statistical learning predicts variability in L2 learning. Part of L2 learning involves detecting the probabilistic patterns of a language (Saffran, Aslin, & Newport, 1996), such that individuals who are better pattern learners may be better able to learn the structural regularities of the L2 input. Results were analyzed in order to determine whether the predictions of the SSH could account for the patterns present in the data. These results suggest that although the acquisition of long-distance dependencies is a protracted process, both intermediate and advanced L2 learners of Spanish could anticipate (predict) a syntactic element based in previously occurring cues. Thus, these results fail to support the predictions of the SSH. In terms of individual differences, overall, neither statistical learning nor inhibitory control appear to modulate the on-line processing of this particular long-distance dependency in Spanish.

Part of the seemingly magical nature of study abroad programs is the imagined community of target language speakers that learners will be able to speak to and connect with, and whose culture they will be invited to join. Far too often, however, study abroad sojourners struggle to actually communicate in the second language (L2), therefore hindering their opportunities to connect with native speakers of the language. This phenomenon is especially salient in short-term study abroad programs where students may have little time for meaningful engagement in the complex activities of social, cultural, and linguistic acclimation. These difficulties are magnified when the increasingly popular short-term study abroad program is a "sheltered" or "island" program (Allen, 2010), in which students take classes designed by faculty at their home institution with peers with whom they share a first language. In response to this situation, this dissertation critically examines the willingness to communicate construct (MacIntyre, Dörnyei, Clément, & Noels, 1998) in the context of a short-term study abroad program in Valladolid, Spain with the goal of understanding why some students eagerly engage with the second language and culture, others do to a lesser degree, and some virtually not at all. This investigation employs a multiple case study approach utilizing ethnographic data collection methods and a sociocultural lens to analyze the construct of willingness to communicate. Data sources include interviews, journals, language contact reports, observations, proficiency assessments, and audio recordings from group activities designed to increase learners' willingness to communicate. Recursive, qualitative analysis of the experiences of three students suggests that experiences, goals, and motivations vary widely across students, and across time, even in just five weeks. Furthermore, analysis suggests that willingness to communicate in a study abroad context does not always align with previous research examining the construct in other settings. Pedagogical and implications for future study abroad program design to foster connections and communication in the target language are also explored.