26.2394, Review: Applied Ling; Cog Sci; Lang Acq; Ling Theories: Xia (2014)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-26-2394. Thu May 07 2015. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 26.2394, Review: Applied Ling; Cog Sci; Lang Acq; Ling Theories: Xia (2014)

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Date: Thu, 07 May 2015 15:44:12
From: Liubov Baladzhaeva [baladjaeva at gmail.com]
Subject: Categorization and L2 Vocabulary Learning

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/25/25-2882.html

AUTHOR: Xiaoyan  Xia
TITLE: Categorization and L2 Vocabulary Learning
SUBTITLE: A Cognitive Linguistic Perspective
SERIES TITLE: Series: Duisburger Arbeiten zur Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaft - Volume 101
PUBLISHER: Peter Lang AG
YEAR: 2014

REVIEWER: Liubov Baladzhaeva, University of Haifa

Review's Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

This monograph represents a study on categorization in second language (L2)
vocabulary learning, mainly focusing on the prototypicality effect and the
basic level effect (see below).

The author is interested in the relationship between the existing conceptual
system of the learner in her first language (L1) and the L2 lexicon: whether
there are two separate conceptual systems or it is a single system in the mind
of a learner, , or initially L2 words are mapped onto the existing system,
while later a new conceptual layer is added for L2 words that do not match the
first language concepts. The study is conducted in the framework of
experientalism (Lakoff, 1987). According to experientalism, speakers of
different languages categorize their experiences differently, which is
reflected in the linguistic expression. Therefore, an L2 learner’s original L1
conceptual system is inevitably different from the conceptual system of the
language that is being learned. Experientalism pays special attention to two
effects in the learning of words: basic-level effect and prototypicality
effect. There are two dimensions of conceptual categories. The horizontal
dimension involves the separation of conceptual categories at the same level
of categorization, such as “cup”, “mug” and “glass” as members of a category
“drinking vessels”. The vertical dimension presents levels of organization
within a specific category, such as “animal companion”, “dog” and “collie”,
where “dog” represents the basic or “middle” level of the category.
Basic-level effect is that the conceptual categories at the basic level of the
hierarchy are primary in perception and recall. In the first language the
words that signify basic-level categories are learned more easily. Each
horizontal level of a category has several elements, of which some are more
and some are less prototypical. For example, dogs and cows are more
prototypical examples of the category “animal” than ants and butterflies. Just
as with the basic-level effect, the prototypicality effect means that in the
first language more prototypical words in the category are learned and
recalled more easily than less prototypical words. The author sets out to
investigate whether these two effects would work in second language learning
as well, and what happens when there is a mismatch between prototypical
examples of the same categories in the first and the second languages.

The study examines these two effects with the example of Chinese native
speakers learning English. It consists of several experiments. The first two
experiments investigated whether basic-level and prototypicality effects exist
in L2 vocabulary learning. The third experiment investigated the issue of
cultural differences in prototypicality in L1 and L2 and how these affect L2
vocabulary learning.

The hypothesis of the first experiment was that L2 learners would prefer basic
level L2 words, when they are simultaneously introduced to several levels of
the same category (superordinate, basic, and subordinate). The participants
were Chinese students learning English in a university in Beijing. The
experiment consisted of two parts. The first part was designed to study which
level of the category would be better remembered. The participants were given
lists of three words, such as “wading bird”-“crane”-“red-crowned crane”. The
three words were accompanied by Chinese translations for each word and a
picture of the word on the subordinate level (“red-crowned crane”) that was
presented as reflecting the whole category. The participants were divided into
4 groups and the order of word-level presentation was changed for each group,
so that one group saw words presented in “basic-superordinate-subordinate”
order, the other one – in “superordinate-basic-subordinate” etc. The
participants were told to memorize the words. In the cued recall task they
were presented with a picture from the memorization task and were told to name
it in English. In the second part of this experiment another group of students
was given the same stimuli but told to select only one word out of the three
and memorize just this word. Then the participants performed a cued recall
task in which they needed to name the pictures from the memorization task. The
results showed that in both parts of the experiment in the cued recall group
the participants tended to recall basic-level words better than superordinate
or subordinate; thus the research hypothesis was supported.

The second experiment’s hypothesis was that the L2 words denoting the
prototypical members of the category would be retrieved better than the words
denoting the non-prototypical members. Only the words that matched in
prototypicality in both Chinese and English were used in this experiment. The
participants were Chinese university students from Beijing. Sixteen new words
were presented to the participants accompanied with Chinese translations.
There were 8 categories of words, 2 words per category; for example, “vulture”
and “rooster” exemplified the “birds” category, where “vulture” would be a
more prototypical example than “rooster”. The participants were not told that
the words belonged to specific categories and the 16 words were presented in a
random order. The participants were asked to memorize the words, and in the
recall task they were asked to write down words that they remembered as
belonging to a specific category. On the whole the participants were
significantly more likely to recall the prototypical items than
non-prototypical examples of the category; thus the research hypothesis was
supported. This experiment was then repeated with the words known to the
participants before the study; for example, “table” and “piano” were presented
as members of the category “furniture”. With the already known words the
prototypicality effect in recall was even more pronounced.

The third experiment was designed to see how the prototypicality effect plays
itself out in L2 learning if there is a mismatch between L1 and L2, that is,
when one item is a prototypical member of the category in L1, but
non-prototypical in L2, and vice versa. First, in a task with native Chinese
and native English speakers, prototypicality norms were investigated.
Basic-level polysemous words were taken in both languages and the participants
were asked to list the “senses” of the words. For example, for the word
“green” the following “senses” were listed in English: “inexperienced”,
“sick”, “environmental”, “envious” etc. Then the most frequent senses from
both languages were put together in a list for the prototypicality rating
task. Two other groups of native speakers were given the lists of the senses
and asked to rate the prototypicality of each item on a 3-point scale. This
allowed the construction of  lists of items that were prototypical in one
language, but non-prototypical in another. For example, in the category
“white” the sense “funeral” was prototypical in Chinese, but non-prototypical
in English, while the sense “wedding” was prototypical in English, but
non-prototypical in Chinese. In the third part of this experiment, two groups
of Chinese university students were given a list of 16 new words to memorize.
The list contained 8 conceptual categories with two items in each, one
prototypical in Chinese, but not in English, and the other prototypical in
English, but not in Chinese. The words were presented one by one in a random
order, accompanied by the Chinese translation. It was not stated which
category the words belonged to. The students were asked to memorize the words.
In the recall section the categories (original polysemous words) were given as
cues and the participants were asked to recall English words from the
memorization section that fit into these particular categories. In one group,
the recall cues were given in English, in another group they were given in
Chinese. Both groups recalled the words prototypical in Chinese, but
non-prototypical in English better than the other way around. The author
concludes that in case of mismatched prototypicality, without additional
instruction, L2 learners will assign prototypicality to L2 words according to
L1 semantic categories. However, if explicitly taught the cultural
differences, they can acquire L2 categories as well. Therefore, initially only
one L1 conceptual system exists in the mind of a L2 learner, but after
learning about the differences between categories in L1 and L2 the system can
be restructured in order to accommodate L2 in addition to L1.

EVALUATION

This book presents a very interesting series of experiments, and its
conclusions regarding the presence of basic-level and prototypicality effects
in L2 learning have important teaching implications. The study has a solid
theoretical background in experientalism, and the experiments are carefully
designed.

The author acknowledges herself that the presence of Chinese translations in
the tasks might have affected the preferences of the participants in
memorization and recall tasks, since the Chinese words were organized into the
same hierarchy as the English words. In this case, the preference for the
basic-level words may partially be a result of reliance on Chinese categories
in learning English vocabulary.

I am concerned whether the last experiment on cultural differences in
prototypicality in L2 learning indeed tested what it was supposed to test. In
this experiment, words “glorious”, “dignified”, “energetic”, “evil” etc. are
representative of the category “dragon” and are called “senses” of the word
dragon. It seems, that while in some cases, the multiple meanings of the words
are used in the experiment (such as “young” as a meaning of “green), in other
cases, the senses represent associations and not meanings. I think this would
be a great experiment to investigate the effect of associative chains in L2
learning, but it does not seem to be testing the prototypicality effect. The
idea behind the experiment is very interesting – for example, that dragons
exist in both English and Chinese cultures, but those are very different kind
of dragons and different kinds of qualities are associated with them. A
picture recall task similar to the first two experiments might be more
suitable for investigating the prototypicality effect in case of the mismatch
between L1 and L2. For example, it would be interesting to see whether Chinese
learners of English recall the word ‘dragon’ faster if they are presented with
the image of a classic Chinese dragon than with an image of a dragon from
Western mythology. 

REFERENCES

Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal
About the Mind. Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Liubov Baladzhaeva is a PhD student at the University of Haifa. She is
interested in multilingualism, language acquisition and attrition.





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