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The goal of this dissertation is to argue on the basis of the minimalist framework that the topichood of sentence topics and contrastive focus result from derivational and structural differences in the left periphery and to provide acquisition data from child language to support this claim, showing data from Korean, a free word-order and pro-drop language in which topics and contrastive foci are realized morphologically. In Korean, topic phrases merge in the left periphery and contrastive focus phrases undergo scrambling, one of the shared properties of free word-order languages. It is consistent in fixed word-order languages such as Italian and Hungarian and a free word-order language like Korean that topics merge and contrastive foci move to the left. Topics precede contrastive foci: topics merge in TopP, a higher functional projection than FocP, to which focus phrases move. In the process of language acquisition, the derivational and structural differences between topic phrases and contrastive focus phrases may have influences on the developmental order of grammar acquisition. In acquisition data from two-year-old Korean children, topics emerge earlier than contrastive foci, indicating that topic and contrastive focus are also acquisitionally different. This study is the first attempt to examine the structural differences and the influence on language acquisition of morphologically derived topic phrases and contrastive focus phrases in acquisition data from a free word-order and pro-drop language. This study shows the structural consistency of topic and contrastive focus between a free word-order language and fixed word-order languages. The syntactic and acquisitional distinction of topic merge and contrastive focus movement is compatible with the semantic and pragmatic approaches to topic and focus. This study provides evidence of the syntactic differences between topic and contrastive focus without dependence on phonetic features; therefore, this study is a base for drawing a map of the left periphery of human languages. / text

published_or_final_version / Linguistics / Master / Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Educational Psychology / Master / Master of Social Sciences

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Educational Psychology / Master / Master of Social Sciences

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No description available.

Recent studies in the acquisition of a second language (L2) phonology have revealed that orthography can influence, both positively and negatively, the way L2 learners come to establish target-like lexical representations. The majority of these studies, however, involve language pairs relying on a Roman-based script. In comparison, the influence of a foreign or unfamiliar written representation on L2 phonolexical acquisition remains understudied. This dissertation aims to fill this gap. CHAPTER 2 considers the effects of multiple scripts (e.g. Arabic, Cyrillic, Roman-Maltese, etc.) on the acquisition of the Arabic voiceless pharyngeal fricative /ħ/ and the voiceless uvular fricative /χ/ word-initially. Monolingual native speakers of English participated in a set of five word-learning experiments where they were instructed to learn six pairs of minimally contrastive words, each associated with a unique visual referent. In each experiment, a different script configuration was manipulated. After an initial learning phase, participants were then tested on their phonological acquisition of these L2 minimal pairs. Results show significant differences in phonological accuracy between groups of learners exposed to varying degrees of script unfamiliarity. Specifically, complete script foreignness exerted an inhibitory effect on L2 phonolexical acquisition, while semi-foreign scripts exercised differential inhibitory effects based on whether grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) also activated L1 phonological units. Two follow-up spelling experiments were also conducted in an attempt to find a more intuitive, symbolic representation of these L2 phonemes. While spellers managed to find various ways to symbolically encode /χ/-words from /ħ/-words, when presented in minimal pairs (but not when presented randomly), no form-consistent pattern emerged from their spelling renditions. These spelling experiments nevertheless support the interpretation that L1 GPCs are likely activated in the course of L2 phonological processing. CHAPTER 3 examines the acquisition of another nonnative phonological contrast, that of Japanese singleton/geminate consonants word-medially. In another set of five word-learning experiments manipulating various aspects of unfamiliar scripts (e.g. Hiragana, Roman/Cyrillic blended), it was found that the acquisition of such a length-based contrast was significantly affected by the foreign written input only when the unfamiliar characters encoding the contrast were graphically highlighted (by way of font coloring and underline) or when they did not convey any information about the durational dimension of the L2 contrast (i.e. when both singletons and geminates were represented with a single character, instead of two for the geminates). These inhibitory effects show that learners are susceptible to be confused by small details featured in unfamiliar written representations presented to them in the course of L2 phonoloxical acquisition. Similar to Chapter 2, two follow-up spelling experiments were conducted. Here, spellers failed to symbolically mark a difference between singleton and geminate auditory items, whether they were presented randomly or in minimal pairs. This lack of differentiation in writing suggests that a consonantal singleton/geminate contrast is a priori not so intuitive to native English speakers. The contributions of this dissertation are manifold. First, the present results provide strong evidence that, aside from recognized acoustic and phonological features influencing the acquisition of a second language sound system, extra-linguistic elements such as written representations also contribute to the acquisitional experience of L2 learners. Furthermore, such findings show that exposure to unfamiliar written representations can significantly inhibit the successful creation of target-like phonological representations, an outcome that has thus far not been attested. Second, it provides additional and complementary research in the subfield of L2 acquisition dealing with the interaction of phonological and orthographic knowledge. The work presented here indeed expands the scope of L2 contrasts and script treatments thus far investigated. Third, implications for second language teaching and loanword phonology can be envisaged. Methods geared towards the acquisition of L2 sounds for instance could be designed taking into account the results obtained here, namely, the fact that a foreign written support may not always be beneficial to learners, depending on the degree of familiarity with the L2 writing system.

The structural complexity and the typological universals associated with relative clauses (RCs) have made the structure particularly interesting to linguists and second language acquisition (SLA) researchers. Currently, much controversy is found in RCs in East Asian Languages. This dissertation tests the syntactic status of "relative clauses" in Chinese and explores second language (L2) learners' processing and production of different types of Chinese RCs.In the theoretical part of the dissertation, I test whether Comrie (2002)'s proposal of analyzing putative relative clauses in East Asian languages as "attributive clauses" can be applicable to Chinese. From a review of syntactic literature and movement test, I argue that there are crucial differences between Chinese RCs and attributive clauses. Further, reconstruction effect suggests that A-bar movement takes place within gapped Chinese RCs. More specifically, following Sauerland (2000)'s proposal, I suggest that the derivation of Chinese RCs involves the movement of an operator taking a complex NP as its complement to the Spec of CP, and that complex NP matches with an external head outside the RC.Further, I examine the possibility of analyzing AdjP+DE structure as relative clauses, and examine the flexibility and effect of demonstrative and numeral-classifier positions and their relation with relative clauses.In the experiment chapter, I discuss results from three experiments that tested the relative degrees of difficulty for L2 learners among different types of RCs including Subject, Direct Object, Indirect Object and Object of Preposition relative clauses, I seek plausible linguistic and psycholinguistic proposals in explaining the performance data. The experiments include a self-paced word order judgment task, a written sentence completion task, and a written sentence combination task. It was found that the L2 acquisition of Chinese RCs is generally consistent with the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (Keenan & Comrie, 1977), a typological generalization based on natural languages and a hierarchy that was found to be predictive of learners' order of acquisition in SLA studies of many other languages.

Sorace (1993) suggests that competence at the final stage of non-native acquisition falls into qualitatively distinct categories: (1) incomplete grammar, which lacks a representation for a part of the target system; (2) divergent grammar, which has the target distinctions with non-target instantiations. She captures the general nature of the two systems but leaves their contents undefined. This study adopts her proposal and investigates non-native grammars with respect to acquisition of the Polish aspects: completive, pofective and perfective, in an attempt to define the properties of incomplete or divergent knowledge in the domain of aspect. / According to the account of the aspectual system of Polish proposed in this thesis, acquisition of this system requires knowledge of the following semantic and morpho-syntactic properties: (1) aspectual interpretations, which depend on the semantic features of a VP; (2) the semantic features carried by the aspects; (3) the distinct feature context required for each aspectual interpretation; (4) restriction on feature composition with respect to the syntactic domain of derivation, namely l(exical)-syntax vs. s(syntactic)-syntax. The learners' competence, therefore, must contain information about which feature context yields which interpretation, which interpretations are unrealizable in these contexts, and which aspectual structures are allowed by virtue of their syntactic vs. lexical feature character. The Polish aspectual system involves many elements of knowledge that must be acquired for the L2 end-state to be complete. It also provides a wide range of properties whose nontarget status would lead to a divergent grammar. / Experimental data were elicited from two groups of English speakers who were advanced or near-native learners of Polish in a series of tests (grammaticality judgments, semantic and end-state compatibility tasks, and picture selection) each addressing separate sets of restrictions governing the system. Results were compared to native speaker adult and child controls. / Although the results reveal two types of competence, these cannot be categorically defined as either complete or divergent. While the near-natives' knowledge manifests a complete representation of the elements of the target grammar and native-like distinctions between the aspects, it also bears some characteristics of an incomplete system. The advanced learners manifest a system that is both divergent and incomplete. The study shows that the classification proposed by Sorace (1993) is only appropriate with reference to individual properties of grammar, as a single system of knowledge may show the characteristics of complete, incomplete, divergent and, possibly, non-divergent competence.