This thesis investigates the acquisition of the spatial and figurative meanings of five Spanish spatial particles, namely sobre, encima, debajo, bajo and en, by a group of Chinese university students of Spanish as a foreign language at intermediate and upper-intermediate language levels. More specifically, this study aims to answer two questions. The first question considers the order of acquisition of prepositional meanings, that is, whether this is similar to a native language, with literal and more primary meanings acquired first and figurative ones later or, conversely, whether the pattern of acquisition is different to that found in a first language (Kemmerer, 2005; Lam, 2010). The second question of this research is to determine whether there are observable differences between the degree of acquisition and use of these prepositions in English compared to Spanish, and if so, what the characteristics of these differences are. To try to answer these questions, the performance of this group of participants in four behavioural tests is compared. The tests were a lexical identification task, a picture fill-in-the- blank task, a sentence generation task and a truth value judgment task. These tests were conducted both in Spanish, which the participants had begun to study at undergraduate level and English, which they had first been exposed to in school in a pre-puberty period. The results of this study indicate, first, that the acquisition of the literal and figurative meanings of the spatial particles in this study does not follow a pattern similar to that found in a native language. That is, meaning acquisition in a foreign language occurs in a parallel or simultaneous pattern. Furthermore, in a non-immersion context such as that of this study, the age at which students begin the study of a foreign language is not a decisive factor in determining the degree of mastery that students can obtain. The quantity and quality of the input students are exposed to; together with an appropriate methodology appear to be the most important factors in predicting the level of proficiency that can be reached.

This thesis investigates the L2 English pronunciation of a native speaker of German who has lived in western Canada for 25 years. The goal of the study was understand the defining features of his accent, to determine what factors contributed to his accent, and to characterize his interlanguage grammar. There are two opposing theories about L2 speakers’ linguistic competence, encoded in what is called their interlanguage grammar: 1) The L2 speaker has several heterogeneous grammars at their disposal depending on discourse type (the socio-/psycholinguistic theory), so variable task performance is indicative of variable competence, and 2) variable task performance exists but it not indicative of variable competence. Instead, competence is a stable, homogenous system and it is performance that is variable (the generative/rationalist theory). This thesis discusses the concepts of variable competence in light of the L2 English pronunciation investigated. The subject’s pronunciation of a variety of speech sounds of North American English was tested in three production tasks with differing formality levels: wordlist, sentences, and a semi-spontaneous interview. Additionally, in a qualitative element of this study, extra-linguistic factors like motivation, attitude, aptitude, identity, and personality of the L2 speaker were investigated to determine how they contribute to L2 accented speech production. These were reported through an interview with the subject and a self-assessment of his L2 pronunciation proficiency. Finally, through native speaker judgments (NSJs), it was assessed whether foreign accentedness in the L2 interferes with intelligibility and comprehensibility. Production data from the three tasks was auditorily and acoustically analyzed to understand the contribution of various intra-linguistic factors to speech production: task type, orthography, cognate status, syllable context, stress, and phonetic environment. This thesis also investigated the validity of predictions made by the Speech Learning Model (Flege, 1995) about the ease of phonetic acquisition of L2 sounds. The findings of this investigative study indicated that the L2 learner has a homogenous interlanguage grammar that is not responsible to variable competences despite variable task type performance. They showed that all variable performance in production could be attributed to intra-linguistic factors that influence performance, but do not alter the mental representation the subject has of these L2 sounds. Additionally, the findings showed that the Speech Learning Model does not accurately predict the ease or difficulty of acquisition of L2 speech sounds. Furthermore, the findings indicated that mispronunciation of individual speech sounds resulting in accentedness does not hinder effective communication in the L2, nor does accented speech production reflect an impoverished L2 interlanguage grammar. It further revealed that the subject was aware of his interlanguage grammar differing from that of native speakers of English. Findings from the qualitative interview study indicated that the subject makes use of his accent as an identity marker to reflect his cultural attachment to his home country Germany. / Graduate

The questions addressed in this study arose from an earlier project which attempted to provide videoconferencing opportunities for Second Language (SL) teachers to engaging in bilingual “virtual exchanges” for their students (hereafter referred to as “eTandem videoconferencing”). This investigation was initially motivated by the interest on discovering why these teachers and their students did not take the opportunity to participate in the synchronous part of the exchanges. This qualitative study reports on the developmental paths experienced by twenty SL teachers from the US, the UK, Switzerland and Spain and their pupils in the process. It particularly aims to discover what teachers' roles emerge in the process. The research also focuses on how these teachers’ practices are consistent with a more social constructivist approach to Computer Assisted Language Learning. The investigation builds on Hartnell-Young’s theoretical model (2003) of teachers’ roles where computers are used. Data collection involves an initial survey, observation of teachers and students before, during and after the exchanges and video-stimulated recall interviews with the teachers. The research centres on critical incidents experienced by these teachers. Hugues' model (2009) of the expanded critical incident approach provides the methodological framework. In line with her model, the study has created a multifaceted word picture of these teachers, further characterised by a condensed set of critical findings. The teachers’ accounts reveal several incidents that inhibited or supported the teachers’ development in terms of how they planned the learning environment regarding the physical space, the virtual setting and the social environment and in terms of how they mediated the implementation of the exchanges towards a more interactive approach. In doing so, this investigation adds to the knowledge base available to educators and researchers by offering greater understanding about these SL teachers’ particular experiences.

M.A. / Since the 1960s, teaching has become ever-more learner-centred, with the results that drastic changes have been wrought to the theory of language learners' problems. In the present study, - the emphasis falls on linguists' realisation that knowledge of the language-learner's native language (L1) is vital. The principle aim of this study is, therefore, to launch an investigation into the linguistic aspects of the difficulties against which the experimental group has come up. The various schools of thought that have been developing on theoretical linguistics since the 1960s are directional for the approaches to language-learners' problems. In this way the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis has originated within the framework of Structuralism and is based on the premise that the learner's LI has a strong influence on the target language. The standpoint is that the most effective learning materials are those that are based on a scientific description of the language to be acquired, carefully compared with a parallel description of the native language of the learner. Language acquisition was, in line with the Structuralists' Behaviorist view, considered to comprise the overcoming of the effects of L1, which interfere with L2. The latter process of interference or negative transfer had to be unlearned by means of pattern drills and memorisation. With the advent of the Chomskian view of the creative aspects of the language user's competence, in terms of which language users are purported to dispose of language rules for the generation of language utterances, strong criticism was, however, levelled at the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis. Despite this, contrastive studies are still being undertaken. Thanks to the Error Analysis Theory, which has propounded in reaction to the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis, language learners' errors are viewed more positively. The Error Analysis Theory, in turn, gave rise to the interlanguage theory, in terms of which errors constitute a diagnostic tool that could be used to determine the interlanguage stage that the learner has reached on his or her way to acquiring the target language. Learners construct their own set of rules according to which they can try and restore order in the mass of stimuli with which they are being bombarded in terms of this theory, L1 is also considered to be a handy tool in the acquisition of the target language. For the purposes of this study, a contrastive error analysis was performed on the interlanguage used by Northern Sotho speaking teacher students who are going to teach Afrikaans. The data was collected from their written work. Special attention was devoted to general syntactic, morphological, semantic and lexical problems. Structural variances between Afrikaans and Northern Sotho were indicated. Further it was shown that English, in its capacity as the other secondary language, may also be exerting a measure of influence on the structures of the target language, and that other difficulties may also crop up that could not be imputed to interference.

The neural basis of statistical learning as it occurs over time was explored with stimuli drawn from a natural language (Russian nouns). The input reflected the "rules" for marking categories of gendered nouns, without making participants explicitly aware of the nature of what they were to learn. Participants were scanned while listening to a series of gender-marked nouns during four sequential scans, and were tested for their learning immediately after each scan. Although participants were not told the nature of the learning task, they exhibited learning after their initial exposure to the stimuli. Independent component analysis of the brain data revealed five task- related sub- networks. Unlike prior statistical learning studies of word segmentation, this morphological learning task robustly activated the inferior frontal gyrus during the learning period. This region was represented in multiple independent components, suggesting it functions as a network hub for this type of learning. Moreover, the results suggest that subnetworks activated by statistical learning are driven by the nature of the input, rather than reflecting a general statistical learning system.

No description available.

This thesis focuses on the production and perception of ten English vowels (/i, ɪ, e, ɛ, æ, ʌ, ɑ, o, ʊ, u/) by native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) living in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. The participants consisted of 14 native speakers of BP (divided into intermediate and advanced second language (L2) English proficiency groups), plus six native speakers of Canadian English (CE) as control participants. Four experiments were carried out: two pertaining to production and two pertaining to perception. The production tasks consisted of CE and BP wordlist reading tasks in order to measure the duration and first two formants of the participants’ vowels, while the perception tasks consisted of an identification task and an oddity-discrimination task. With regards to production, this thesis investigates how the participants’ productions of the L2 vowels differ between the experimental and control groups with respect to their formant frequencies and the Euclidean distances (EDs) between various English vowel pairs. Similarly, the participants’ perceptual abilities, as measured by their performance on the perception tests, are examined. Finally, the connection between perception and production is investigated. The findings indicate (a) a positive effect of proficiency, as the advanced participants showed a greater ability to both produce and perceive the L2 vowels, but that (b) participants of both proficiency levels have difficulty in contrasting certain English vowel pairs in a native-like fashion. Furthermore, the findings provide evidence of a connection between perception and production, and show that perception outperforms production, as predicted by the Speech Learning Model (Flege, 1995, 2005). Finally, the findings indicate a possible positive effect of environment (i.e., an English-speaking country) when compared to previous studies (Bion et al., 2006, Rauber, 2006). Pedagogical implications of these findings are also discussed. / Graduate

Influential bodies of work in language acquisition studies single out heritage bilingualism as a discrete acquisition process within the bilingualism continuum. In regards to the acquisition of WH-/QU- interrogatives containing prepositional phrases (PP), the present study examined whether heritage speakers (HS) of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) produce preposition stranding (P-stranding) constructions in their heritage language, in contrast to monolingual and adult speakers of BP, where prepositions are pied-piped to form the interrogative. Participants were HS of BP born in the USA and in Brazil, monolinguals, and late bilingual adults. The experiment consisted of an elicited production task and a grammaticality judgment task, both carried out in BP and then in English. Results showed that HS born in the USA use P-stranding in QU- interrogatives productively and systematically, in contrast to the other three groups. Moreover, no evidence of protracted acquisition was found in this group. No signs of attrition were detected among bilinguals.

This case study follows eleven non-English speaking students as they adapt to community college, content courses. The three classes examined are required freshman classes--Humanities, Social Environment, and Individual in Transition. In order to cope with the demands of these classes, students must penetrate the academic discourse community and have effective relationships with their instructors and their peers. The results of the study are based on interviews with eleven non-native speaking (NNS) students and their instructors and on an analysis of student writing assignments, course syllabi, and exams. Three general areas are examined: (a) students' first-language (L1) education, (b) the requirements of their content classes, and (c) the affective factors which influence their adaptation process. The case of these students reveals that: 1. Students draw on their L1 education, especially in terms of content, as they cope with the demands of these content classes. 2. In some areas L1 educational experiences interfere with students' ability to adapt. 3. The content classes require students to have well developed reading, writing, oral, and aural skills. 4. Students must use higher level cognitive skills to be successful in content classes. 5. Affective factors play a role in students' success in content classes. The discussion section includes possible implications of this data for college level English as a Second Language courses.

The research presented in this PhD dissertation examines the phenomenon of semantic implicit learning, using semantic preferences of novel verbs as a test case. Implicit learning refers to the phenomenon of learning without intending to learn or awareness that one is learning at all. Semantic preference (or selectional preference – as preferred in computational linguistics) is the tendency of a word to co-occur with words sharing similar semantic features. For example, ‘drink’ is typically followed by nouns denoting LIQUID, and the verb ‘chase’ is typically followed by ANIMATE nouns. The material presented here spans across disciplines. It examines a well-documented psychological phenomenon - implicit learning – and applies it in the context of language acquisition, thereby providing insights into both fields. The organisation of this dissertation groups its experiments by their methodology. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the current psychological and linguistic literature. Chapter 2 includes a pen-and-paper study carried out in a classroom environment on Polish learners of English, where awareness is assessed by subjective measures taken at each test question as well as a post-experiment questionnaire. Chapter 3 includes a collection of 5 computer-based experiments based on a false-memory paradigm. After exposure to sentential contexts containing novel verbs, participants are shown to endorse more previously unseen verb-noun pairings that follow the correct semantic preference patterns to the pairings that violate it. The result holds even when participants do not reveal any explicit knowledge of the patterns in the final debriefing. Awareness is additionally assessed using indirect measures examining correlations of confidence judgements with performance. Chapter 4 examines whether implicit learning of novel verb semantic preference patterns is automatic. To this end, a reaction time procedure is developed based on two consecutive decisions (“double decision priming”). The method reveals that semantic implicit learning, at least in the described cases, exerts its influence with a delay, in post-processing. Chapter 5 comprises research done in collaboration with Dr Nitin Williams, University of Reading. It documents an attempt at finding neural indices of implicit learning using a novel single-trial analysis of an electroencephalographic (EEG) signal, based on empirical mode decomposition (EMD) denoising. Chapter 6 presents a final discussion and indications for future research. The main contribution of this dissertation to the general field of implicit learning research consists in its challenging the predominant view that implicit learning mainly relies on similarity of forms presented in training and test. The experiments presented here require participants to make generalisations at a higher, semantic level, which is largely independent of perceptual form. The contribution of this work to the field of Second Language Acquisition consists of empirical support for the currently popular but seldom tested assumptions held by advocates of communicative approaches to language teaching, namely that certain aspects of linguistic knowledge can develop without explicit instruction and explanation. At the same time, it challenges any view assuming that vocabulary learning necessarily relies on explicit mediation. The experiments collected here demonstrate that at least word usage in context can be learnt implicitly. A further contribution of this dissertation is its demonstration that the native language may play a key role in determining what is learnt in such situations. A deeper understanding of the phenomenon of semantic implicit learning promises to shed light on the nature of word and grammar learning in general, which is crucial for an account of the processes involved in the development of a second language mental lexicon.