language processes Liz Temple
6. Conclusion
of second language learning, it may be that automaticity is never realised to the same extent as in native speech (see Cook 1997). Experiments com-paring bilinguals’ performance across their two languages and also with monolinguals’ performance, have found not only slower processing in the non-dominant language of bilinguals, but also slower processing in their dominant language compared with monolinguals (Dornic 1979). Recently it has been hypothesised that the crucial difference between late second lan-guage learning and first lanlan-guage acquisition is the use of explicit memory in L2 acquisition, involving different brain structures from those available in child language acquisition (Fabbro 1999: 100–102). This is said to explain the generally held view that acquisition of syntax is more difficult after age 6–8 years, and may never be completely nativelike (Hyltenstam and Abrahamsson 2000). However, the case of late naturalistic acquisition, in which declarative memory is less likely to be involved, is left unexplained by this account. Moreover, the results of this investigation point to a change in the balance of automatic and controlled processes, or a restructuring of the underlying mechanisms of L2 speech, and not just a speed-up of explicit memory processes.
instructed learners with that of learners acquiring a second language in natu-ral settings. In this investigation, of learners in a formal instruction setting over a relatively short period of time and without in-country experience, im-provement in speech rate was achieved by all but the most fluent subjects.
Greater fluency did not equate with a simple speed-up of speech, but a move to clausal planning, with less hesitant production of phrases reflecting the development of implicit knowledge and automatic procedures.
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in instructed GFL learning Barbara Menzel
1. Introduction
Child: Die Affe nehm ich nicht mit.
[Thenom femmonkey take I not along.]
‘I am not going to take the monkey along.’
Interviewer: Die Affe ist bestimmt nicht richtig, weil es heißt ja nicht die Affe oder das Affe, sondern der Affe. Also ?
‘Thenom femmonkey is certainly not correct, because it is not thenom femmonkey or thenom neumonkey, but thenom mascmonkey.
Well ?’
Child: Der Affe nehm ich nicht mit.
[Thenom mascmonkey take I not along.]
‘I am not going to take the monkey along.’
Interviewer: Der Affe geht auch nicht.
[Thenom mascmonkey works also not.]
‘The monkey doesn’t work either.’
Child: Mhm. Was geht denn dann ? [Mhm. What works then ?]
‘Mhm. What will do then ?’
Interviewer: Mit den. Also, sag nochmal.
[With theacc masc. Well, say one more time.]
‘With the. Well, try again.’
Child: Den Affe fährt net mit oder so.
[Theacc mascmonkey drives not along or so.]
‘The monkey is not going to come along or something like that.’
Interviewer: Ja, dann mußt du sagen der. Der Affe fährt nicht mit, aber den – mit mitnehmen.
[Well, then must you say thenom masc. Thenom mascmonkey drives not along, but theacc masc– with take along.]
‘Well, in this case you have to say the. The monkey is not going to come along, but you have to use the with take along.’
Child: Warum muß jetzt immer des ich machen ?1 [Why must now always that I make ?]
‘Why do I always have to do that kind of thing ?’
This example vividly illustrates that the assignment of grammatical gender to nouns poses a challenging problem even to quite advanced learners of German as a foreign language. For a native speaker of a gender language, on the other hand, the grammatical gender of nouns obviously depicts a completely inconspicuous phenomenon in spite of its relevance for nearly every utterance, “unobtrusive to the point that native speakers may not even be aware that their language has a gender system” (van Berkum 1996: 2).
One of the striking difficulties the L2 learner of German has to face is the apparent arbitrariness with which the nouns seem to be distributed across the three gender classes. More than a century ago, the American writer Mark Twain has commented on this problem in his brilliantly written essay on The Awful German Language as follows:
A person who has not studied German can form no idea of what a perplexing language it is […]. Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of each noun must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this, one has to have a memory like a memorandum book. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl.
(quoted from: Mills 1986: 12) And although descriptive linguistics has developed a complex system of interacting rules for the assignment of grammatical gender to German nouns, based upon semantic, morphological, and phonological regularities (e.g. Wegera 1997: chap. 2), it is not clear if at all, and if yes, to what extend these regularities correspond to the psycholinguistic reality of the language learner.
Table 1. Declension paradigm of the definite article
masculine feminine neuter plural
nominative der die das die
genitive des der des der
dative dem der dem den
accusative den die das die
The problem the learner is facing is rendered even more difficult by the complexity of the declension paradigm (Tab.1). Not only does each form of the definite article reflect the fusion of information on the three morpho-syntactic dimensions gender, case, and number – the inference of a noun’s gender from the syntagmatic context is further aggravated by the high degree of syncretism within the paradigm: there are only six different forms to fill the 16 possible cells, so that no single form of the definite article defines a unique combination of gender, case, and number marking.
Since grammatical gender is not a universal feature of languages and obviously poses quite an extra burden on learners’ memories, one might thus as well ask why a language like German does not entirely do away with this feature, especially since so many other languages are functioning just fine without it. Interestingly enough, while German exhibits various symptoms of decline in the case marking system, there are no such traces whatsoever in respect to gender marking. It might thus be useful to follow Andersen’s (1984) question “What’s gender good for, anyway?” and have a closer look at the functions of grammatical gender in language processing in order to reconsider whether grammatical gender can in fact be regarded as an “unwichtiges Merkmal, das sich überall so wichtig macht” [unimpor-tant feature that assumes an air of importance everywhere] (Werner 1975:
50).
The introductory interview passage furthermore demonstrates the ele-mental relevance of founded gender knowledge for the construction of the entire declension paradigm. Here, the corrective feedback of the inter-viewer clearly shows that the first step to finding the correct article is establishing the appropriate gender class (der Affe [thenom masc monkey]), followed by the identification of the article form corresponding to the ap-propriate case context (dernom resp. denacc) within the masculine paradigm.
Following this observation, the paper sets out to investigate the input con-ditions and psycholinguistic processes that influence the acquisition of grammatical gender of GFL learners in the earlier stages of language learn-ing. Starting from the assumption that native speakers obviously make use of a complex (internal) system of gender regularities which allows them to assign gender even to previously unknown items relatively homogeneously (Köpcke and Zubin 1983: 173; Köpcke and Zubin 1984; MacWhinney 1978: 66– 69; Mills 1986: 79–85), the question is to what degree GFL learners have already developed such an internal gender assignment system.
The results of two gender assignment studies reveal a clear connection between correctness rates resp. latencies and type resp. token frequencies of nouns following the various gender regularities in the input. Finally, a connectionist model is constructed and trained on comparable input in order to simulate the gender acquisition process of the learners and their capability to extract gender-relevant structural patterns from the input.