29.4520, Review: English; Romance; Applied Linguistics; Language Acquisition; Semantics; Syntax: Duffeler (2017)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-29-4520. Wed Nov 14 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.4520, Review: English; Romance; Applied Linguistics; Language Acquisition; Semantics; Syntax: Duffeler (2017)

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Date: Wed, 14 Nov 2018 15:51:40
From: Hongying Xu [hxu at uwlax.edu]
Subject: The Comprehension of Relative Clauses by Romance Learners of English: Syntactic and Semantic Influences

 
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AUTHOR: Marie-Anne C.M. Duffeler
TITLE: The Comprehension of Relative Clauses by Romance Learners of English: Syntactic and Semantic Influences
SERIES TITLE: LOT Dissertation Series
PUBLISHER: Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics / Landelijke (LOT)
YEAR: 2017

REVIEWER: Hongying Xu, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse

SUMMARY 

Marie-Anne Duffeler’s monograph “The Comprehension of Relative Clauses by
Romance Learners of English: Syntactic and Semantic Influences” investigates,
as the title indicates, the roles that syntax and semantics play in the
comprehension of English relative clauses (RCs) by Romance language learners
of L2 English: native speakers of French and Italian, to be more exact.
Specifically, she investigated the following questions:

a) does the syntactic function of the head nouns in the relative clause affect
L2 learners’ comprehension of the RCs; if so, does it conform to the Noun
Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (NPAH) proposed by Keenan and Comrie (1977)? 

b) does the position of the preposition in the oblique relative clauses affect
learners’ comprehension; i.e., whether the preposition  has been moved to the
position before the relative pronoun (the pied-piped position) or has stayed 
internally in the relative clause (stranded position)  does L1 transfer play a
role? 

c) does the semantic meaning of the preposition (locative vs. non-locative) in
the oblique RC affect learners’ comprehension? 

This monograph is based on her thesis, which investigated the above mentioned
research questions. There are altogether six chapters and each chapter will be
briefly summarized in the following section. The first chapter introduces the
setting of this study. The second chapter summarizes previous studies on RCs
and summarizes her research design. The third chapter reports the experiment
conducted among French-speaking learners of English on their comprehension of
RCs. The fourth chapter reports the experiment done with the group of
Italian-speaking learners. The fifth chapter reports the experiment on
Italian-speaking L2 English learners’ comprehension of oblique RCs. The last
chapter recaps the research questions, findings, and conclusions by putting
the three experiments together. 

Chapter 1 introduces the motivation of this study based on the importance of
syntax acquisition and the gap identified in the current literature on the
acquisition of RC by L2 learners. Specifically, the author pointed out the
following weaknesses along this line: a) the studies were set up on the basis
of research on L1 RCs by employing a diversity of hypotheses, thus they lack
focus; b) the skills investigated are mainly procession and production, but
not much research exists solely on comprehension; c) most studies focused on
the subject-object asymmetry, but not on other types of RCs; d) the
methodology employed is very limited: mostly production tasks or
grammaticality acceptance tasks; e) there is a lack of consensus on the
findings. She then justifies her study, which are intended to expand research
along these lines.  

Chapter 2 gives a literature review on the research on L1 RCs and L2 RCs and
explains the research design of the present study. It starts by summarizing
different aspects of RCs, including a definition, different types of RCs,
syntactic properties, and a generative analysis of RCs. It goes on to discuss
the typological differences regarding the three specific languages involved in
the present study: English, French, and Italian. It points out the commonality
among these three languages as well as the differences in terms of
relativizing strategies, syntactic restrictions, and so on. It then briefly
summarizes some theories on second language acquisition and L1 transfer. A
large section of this chapter is used to summarize the literature on RC
research in L1 and L2. After a historical review of the trends and
developments in this field, the author mainly reviews the research on the
subject-object asymmetry regarding L1 native adults, children, and L2
learners. Most L1 studies on adults’ processing of RCs as well as on the
children’s comprehension reported an advantage of subject RCs over  object
RCs. A summary of different theoretical accounts to explain this advantage
follows, including the NPAH (Keenan & Comrie, 1977), the Perspective
Hypothesis (PH, MacWhinney, 1997), the Structure Distance Hypothesis (SDH,
O’Grady, 1997), and Frequency of occurrence (Mithell, et al, 1995). The
complexity hypothesis proposed by McDaniel et al. (1998) based on Chomsky’s
Minimalist Theory was also introduced. The research design section introduces
the participants, target RCs and skill investigated, followed by the specific
research questions, including the roles played by syntax, semantics and
transfer from L1. Hypotheses were made accordingly based on the different
accounts respectively: a) there is a gradient of difficulty in comprehension:
subject RC has an advantage over object RC, which in turn has an advantage
over oblique RC; b) the pie-piped oblique RC has an advantage over stranded
oblique RC due to L1 transfer; c) oblique RCs with non-locative preposition
have an advantage over those with locative position due to higher cognitive
load with spatial sentences. 

Chapter 3 presents the experiment design and discusses the results of the
comprehension of RCs by French learners of L2 English. Fifty-nine French
learners of English at intermediate-low level participated in this experiment.
The experiment involved one task: a picture selection task. Participants
listened to a request (Show me …) with a RC embedded in it and then circled
the head noun of the relative clause from three or four candidates in a
picture within 5 seconds. For example, participants would hear: “Show me the
tiger that is pushing the horse.” Then they would see a picture in which there
are two tigers and one horse: with the horse is the middle. The horse is
pushing the tiger in front of it, but is being pushed by the tiger behind it.
Participants were expected to circle the tiger that is behind the horse. There
are altogether 56 sentences: 16 fillers, 16 subject RCs, 8 object RCs, 8
oblique RCs with pie-piped preposition (OBL-PP RCs), 8 oblique RCs with
Stranded Preposition (OBL-PS RCs). Each correct selection got 1 score. The
results indicated that there is no significant difference between
participants’ performance with the subject RCs and the object RCs. However,
participants’ performance with the subject RCs and object RCs were
significantly better than OBL RCs. Furthermore, participants did significantly
better in comprehending OBL-PS RCs than OBL-PP RCs. Therefore, the first
hypothesis was partially supported: the syntactic role of the head noun in the
RCs did affect comprehension, but not in the predicated way. The second
hypothesis was not supported since opposite results were obtained.  

Chapter 4 presents the results of comprehension of RCs by a group of Italian
learners of L2 English. Ninety-one students participated and a majority of the
participants self-evaluated their proficiency level as intermediate-low or
intermediate-high. Two tasks were used with this group: a picture selection
task and an elicited imitation task. The picture selection task was very
similar to the one described above, except that the number and make-up of the
sentences changed. There are altogether 48 sentences: 16 fillers, 8 subject
RCs, 8 object RCs, 8 OBL-PP RCs, and 8 OBL-PS RCs. As for the elicited
imitation task, participants listened to a sentence once and then were given
40 seconds to write down the sentence. There are 25 sentences: 17 fillers, 4
subject RCs, 4 object RCs. The syllables of each sentence were controlled. The
imitation task results were rated by two people. The results from the picture
selection indicated that there was no significant difference between
participants’ performance with subject RCs and object RCs, nor between object
RCs and oblique RCs. However, participants performed significantly better with
subject RCs than oblique RCs. Furthermore, there was no significant difference
between OBL-PP RCs and OBL-PS RCs. The results from the elicited imitation
task did not show any difference between subject RCs and object RCs. 

Chapter 5 presents the experiment on the comprehension of oblique RCs by a
group of Italian learners of L2 English. It was a 2 * 2 design with two
variables: syntax (pie-piped vs. stranded prepositions in RC) and semantics
(locative prepositions vs. non-locative prepositions). For example, “over” in
“stand over” is a locative preposition, whereas “at” in “look at” is
non-locative. Fifty-nine learners participated in this experiment, the
majority of which self-evaluated themselves as learners at the
intermediate-high level. A picture selection task and an elicited imitation
task were used in this experiment with similar procedures, but different
sentences. The results from the picture selection task showed that the
participants did significantly better with OBL-PS RCs than OBL-PP RCs under
both the locative and non-locative preposition settings.  They did
significantly better with non-locative oblique RCs than locative oblique RCs
under both the pip-piped and stranded settings. The results from the elicited
imitation task showed a similar finding with the syntactic variable, however,
opposite results with the semantic variable: participants did better with the
locative ones than the non-locative ones. 

Chapter 6 summarizes the whole thesis by restating the research questions,
hypotheses, and results and highlighting the conclusions and the implications
of this study. To sum up, syntax and semantics both play a role in L2
learners’ comprehension of relative clauses, but not in the exact way
predicted by NPAH or other theoretical accounts. The transfer of L1 has not
been identified. It is concluded that future research in relative clauses
should take more factors into consideration than just the syntactic factor,
and should employ more precise methodology to target specific skills in
acquiring relative clauses. 

EVALUATION 

This monograph is very well-structured both as a whole book and within each
chapter. There are always recapping, referring back, and summaries of content
from the previous chapters, which makes it very easy for readers to follow.
Most of the terms are consistent throughout the book.  

This study has contributed to the research of relative clauses, especially to
the research on L2 acquisition of relative clauses in the following ways.
First, it presents a comprehensive review of existing research on relative
clauses, including linguistic studies, L1 acquisition studies, and L2
acquisition studies. In particular, it has done a thorough investigation and
provided a summary of the studies on the subject-object asymmetry among L1
adults, L1 children, and L2 learners. It also provides a good summary of more
recent studies on RCs, especially the investigation of factors other than
syntax, such as the animiacy of the head nouns and so on. All these will
definitely benefit other scholars when they do research along these lines in
the future. 

Another contribution this study made is the original investigation of
frequency of occurrences of the target types of RCs  using both a British
English corpus and an American English corpus. The findings can be used as
reference for future research.

It also made a good analysis on the weakness of previous studies and
identified the gap in the literature for future research. For example,
previous studies mostly focused on processing or production of RCs, on the
subject-object asymmetry. Moreover, the findings from previous studies, L2 RC
studies in particular, failed to reach consensus. The research questions
investigated in this study are closely connected to the gap identified in the
literature review. It was designed to investigate comprehension instead of
processing or production of RCs and to investigate both syntactic factors and
semantic factors. Moreover, the present study expanded its investigation to
the oblique RCs in addition to subject RCs and object RCs. 

In designing the picture selection tasks, the animacy and category of the head
nouns were controlled to exclude possible confounding factors that had been
identified in previous studies. As for the elicited imitation tasks, the
length of each sentence in terms of syllables was also controlled for the same
reason. All these have contributed to increase the validity of this study. 

The author added the elicited imitation task to the two Italian groups in
order to eliminate the possible ceiling effect from the picture selection
task. Furthermore, the elicited imitation task was creatively used in an
innovative way by making participates reproduce the sentences in written form
rather than in oral form, which has been the normal practice. This gives
scholars another possible option to consider when the imitation task is to be
employed.  

 The data was analyzed with great caution. Friedman’s ANOVA was used since the
data from these tasks lacked a normal distribution. Wilcoxon’s signed
rank-tests were used with a Borferroni correction for pair-wise comparisons. 

However, there are still a few aspects regarding the study goals, experimental
designs, and conclusions that need further discussion. First and foremost,
this study examined the comprehension of RCs; however, in the literature
review part, the previous studies were organized and discussed regarding types
of RCs, different factors and variables affecting RC acquisition rather than
any specific focus on comprehension studies. The theories based on which the
hypotheses regarding the research questions were made are different in nature.
For example, the Syntactic Distance Hypothesis and the Minimalism theory are
both theories about implicit syntax knowledge, whereas the frequency account
is usage-based. It is still unclear if these theories are in a good position
to make predictions on L2 learners’ comprehension. In addition, the findings
from this study were discussed by comparing to previous studies that explored
processing, production, or implicit knowledge of RCs. As has been pointed out
by the author, these are different skills and one does not translate into
another. Therefore, more references are called for to better understand these
findings. 

Secondly, this study attempted to investigate whether L1 transfer presents in
the comprehension of RCs by Romance learners of English. However, there is not
enough literature review or discussion on the theories regarding L1 transfer
in L2 acquisition. The Full Transfer Full Access Hypothesis and a usage-based
account on L1 transfer were briefly introduced. However, the FTFA Hypothesis
only predicts the presence of L1 transfer at the beginning of L2 acquisition.
Moreover, the prediction focuses on L2 learners’ implicit knowledge rather
than their comprehension skills. In the research question and its hypothesis,
it is assumed that since both groups’ L1s only allow the pied-piped position
of the preposition in oblique relative clauses, if L1 transfer is present, the
pied-piped ones should be easier to understand than the position-stranded
ones. This assumption should be taken with caution. On the one hand, even if
the predicted advantage is observed, it may be due to a different factor, the
frequency factor, for instance. In order to tease apart possible factors, a
different group should be included whose native language has an opposition
restriction regarding the position of the preposition in the oblique RCs. On
the other hand, even if there is absence of the predicted advantage, it still
cannot arrive at the conclusion that there is no L1 transfer in L2 acquisition
of RCs. What this study has done is take a snapshot of two basically the same
groups of learners. With neither comparison of groups with different L1s nor
cross-sectional groups within one particular L1, only very limited conclusions
can be drawn about L1 transfer. 

Last but not least, the results of the experiment that investigated the role
of semantics on comprehension of oblique RCs indicated some complication: in
the picture selection task, participants’ comprehension was better with
non-locative prepositions, whereas in the imitation task, participants did
better with the locative prepositions. The author attributed these conflicting
findings to the difference between the tasks. The picture selection task is
more demanding because participants had to process the locatives and to
interpret the pictures at the same time. However, the scores on locatives from
the picture selection task were as high as or even higher than those from the
imitation task. It seems this explanation does not work well. What really
sticks out is the crash down of non-locatives from the imitation task, for
which there is no explanation. Therefore, the conclusion that confirms the
semantic role in comprehension of oblique RCs needs to be considered with
caution.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Hongying Xu is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-La
Crosse. She has a Master’s in TESOL and a PhD in Curriculum and Instruction,
with special interest in second language acquisition in instructional settings
and foreign language pedagogy.





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