The effect of canonical word order on the production and comprehension of pseudoclefts in L2

Journal of Teaching English Lnaguage Studies

مقاله 5، دوره 2، شماره 3، اردیبهشت 2014، صفحه 77-92   

نویسنده

Ashraf Montaseri^*

Islamic Azad University, Takestan, Iran

چکیده

This study investigated the effect of word order and age on the production and comprehension of pseudoclefts in L2 across two experiments. For each experiment 16 female students aged between 179 and 210 months were recruited from a secondary school. These students were divided into two groups based on their age range; one group for investigating the effect of word order and age on the production and another on the comprehension of pseudoclefts in L2 by a test including 27 items. The items of the test included 10 Subject pseudocleft, 10 Object pseudocleft and 7 fillers. Production was examined by a sentence repetition task and comprehension by a picture selection task. The results indicated that (i) Word order is a determining  factor in  production and comprehension of pseudoclefts in L2. (ii) Age does not significantly affect production or comprehension of pseudoclefts in L2.

کلیدواژه‌ها

Cleft؛ Pseudocleft؛ word order؛ Resumption

مراجع

Abbot, B. (2000).Presuppositions as nonassertions. Journal of Pragmatics, 32, 1419-1437.

Akmajian, A. (1970). Aspects of the grammar of focus in English. Ph, D. Dissertation, MIT.

Ardila, A. Rosselli, M. Ostrosky-Solis, F. Marcos, J. Granda, G & Soto, M. (2000). Syntactic comprehension, verbal memory, and calculation abilities in Spanish–English bilinguals. Applied Neuropsychology, 7 (1), 3-16.

Bates, E., Devescovi, A. & D’Amico, S. (1999). Processing complex sentences:A cross- linguistic study. Language and Cognitive Processes, 14, 69–123.

Bock, J. K. (1986). Syntactic persistence in language production. Cognitive Psychology, 18, 355-387. 

Brandt, S., Kidd, E., Lieven, E., & Tomasello, M. (2009). The discourse bases of relativization: An investigation of young German and English-speaking children’s comprehension of relative clauses. Cognitive Linguistics, 20, 539–570.

Calude.A. S. (2008). Demonstrative clefts and double cleft constructions in spontaneous spoken English. Studia Linguistica, 62 (1), 78-118.

Candan, A. C. Kuntay, A. Yeh, Y-c. Cheung, H. Wagner, L & R. Naigles, L. (2012). Language and age effects in children’s processing of word order. Cognitive Development, 27, 205– 221.

Chan, A. Meints, K. Lieven, E & Tomasello, M. (2010). Young children's comprehension of English SVO word order revisited: Testing the same children in act-out and intermodal preferential looking tasks. Cognitive Development, 25, 30-45.

Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory ofsyntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Correa, L. M. (1995). An alternative assessment of children’s comprehension of relative clauses. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 24, 183–203.

Dell, G. S. Burger. L. K & Svec, W. R. (1997). Language production and serial order: A functional analysis and a model. Psychological Review, 104 (1), 123-147.

Diessel, H & Tomasello, M. (2000). The development of relative clauses in spontaneous child speech. Cognitive Linguistics, 11 (1/2), 131-151.

El-Gamal. A. (2001). Presupposition, Perceptional Relativity and Translation Theory. Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, 14 (2001): 37-62.

Erdozia, K. Rodrigues-Fornells, A. Mestres, A. Laka, I. (2005). Processing of word order and mbiguous chains in basque: ERP and behavioral evidences. XIV Conference of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology (ESCOP), Leiden (Netherlands). Retrieved July 29, 2013, from http://www.ehu.es/HEB/wp- content/uploads/2012/ANTIGUOS/Escopazkenaurkezpena.pdf 

Erdocia, K. Laka, I. Mestres-Misse, A & Rodriguez-Fornells, A. (2009). Syntactic complexity and ambiguity resolution in a free word order language: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidences from Basque. Brain and Language 109 (1), 1-17.

Erdocia, K. Laka, I. Rodriguez-Fornells, A. (2012). Processing verb medial word orders in a verb final language. In Peter de Swart and Monique Lamers (eds.). Case, Word Order, and Prominence. Interacting Cues in Language Production and Comprehension. Springer.

Frank, J. Millotte, S & Lassotta, R. (2011). Early word order representations: Novel arguments against old contradictions. Language Acquisition, 18,121–135.

Friedmann, N. (2007). Traceless relatives: Agrammatic comprehension of relative clauses with resumptive pronouns. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 1-12. doi:10.1016/j.jneuroling.2006.10.005

Gavarró, A., Cunill, A., Muntané, M and Reguant, M. (2011). Catalan Child Relative Contrasts as a Processing Effect. In Selected Proceedings of the 4th Conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition North America (GALANA 2010), ed. Mihaela Pirvulescu et al., 37-50. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. www.lingref.com, document #2584

Gibson, E. (1998). Linguistic complexity: Locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition, 68, 1 –76.

Greenberg, J. H. (1966). Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements. In J. H. Greenberg (ed.), Universals of language, 73-113. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Hakuta, K. (1982). Interaction between particles and word order in the comprehension and production of simple sentences in Japanese children. Developmental Psychology,18 (1), 62-76.

Higgins, R. (1973). The Pseudocleft Construction in English. Ph.D. Dissertation, MIT. Published by Garland, New York, 1979.

Hinojosa, J. A. Mendez-Bertolo, C. Carretie, L & POzo, M. A. (2010). Emotion modulates language production during covert picture naming. Neuropsychologia, 48, 1725–1734.

Hsiao, F & Gibson, E. (2003). Processing relative clauses in Chinese. Cognition, 90, 3–27.

Iatridou, S & Varlokosta, S. (1998). Pseudoclefts Crosslinguistically. Natural Language Semantics, 6, 3-28.

Just, M. A. & Carpenter, P. A. (1992). A capacity theory of comprehension: Individual differences in working memory. Psychological Review, 99, 122–49.

Kaiser, E. (2010). Investigating the consequences of focus on the production and comprehension of referring expressions. International Review of Pragmatics, 2, 266–297.

Karimi, S. (2005). A minimalist approach to scrambling: Evidence from Persian. Berlin, Germany: Mouton de Gruyter.

Krashen, S.D. (1987). Principles and Practices in Second Language Acquisition. UK: Prentice-Hall International.

Labelle, M. (1990). Predication, wh-movement and the development of relative clauses. Language Acquisition, 1, 95-119.

Langus, A & Nespor, M. (2010). Cognitive systems struggling for word order. Cognitive Psychology, 60, 291–318.

Lenneberg, E. (1967). Biological Foundations of Language. New York: Wiley.

Levelt W. J. M., Roelofs A., Meyer A. S. (1999). A theory of lexical access in speech production. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 1–75.

Levelt, W. J. M. (2001). Spoken word production: A theory of lexical access. Proceedings

of the National Academy of Sciences, 98, 13465–13471.

Levy, R. Fedorenko, E & Gibson, T. (2012).  The Syntactic Complexity of Russian Relative Clauses. Preprint submitted to Elsevier, 1-62.

Lirola, M. M. (2003). Reflections on Some Syntactical Processes and their Communicative Implications in Two Short Stories Written by Julia lvarez: My English and A Genetics of Justice.Revista Estudios Ingleses, 16, 1-32.

Marcos, J., & Ostrosky, F. (1995). Estrategias para la asignación de papeles temáticos en la interpretación de enunciados en español [Strategies for the assignment of thematic roles in the interpretation of Spanish statements]. In D. Pool (Ed.), Estudios en linguistica formal (pp. 47–62). Mexico City, Mexico: El Colegio de México.

Osada, N. (2004). Listening comprehension research: A brief review of the past thirty years. Dialogue, 3, 53-66.

Pardo, L. S. (2004). What every teacher needs to know about comprehension. The reading teacher, 58 (3), 272–280

Perfetti, C. Yang, C-L & Schmalhofer, F. (2008). Comprehension skill and word-to-text integration processes. Applied cognitive psychology, 22, 303–318.

Prince, Ellen. F. (1978). A Comparison of Wh-Clefts and it-Clefts in Discourse. Language, 54(4), 883-906. 

Rahmany, R., Marefat, H & Kidd, E (2011). Persian speaking children’s acquisition of relative clauses. European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 8 (3), 367–388. 

Rahmany, R., Marefat, H., & Kidd, E. (in press). Resumptive elements aid comprehension of object relative claus : Evidence from Persian. Journal of Child Language.

Richgels, D. J. (1983). The roles of expectation and syntactic knowledge in second and fourth graders' comprehension of complex sentences. Language and Speech, 26 (2), 159-170.

Richgels, D. J. (1986). Grade school children's listening and reading comprehension of complex sentences. Reading Research and Instruction, 25 (3), 201-219.

Schafer, A. Carter, J. Clifton Jr, C & Frazier. L. (1996). Focus in relative clause construal. Language and Cognitive Processes, 11 (1/2), 135-163.

Sheldon, A. (1974). The role of parallel function in the acquisition of relative clauses in English. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 13, 272–81.

Simmonds, A. J. Wise. R. J. S & Leech, R. (2011). Two tongues, one brain: Imaging bilingual speech production.Frontiers in Psychology, 2, 166. doi:  10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00166. PMCID: PMC3139956.

Slobin, D. I. (1973). Cognitive prerequisites for the development of grammar. In C. A. Ferguson & D. I. Slobin (eds), Studies of child language development, 175–208. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Slobbin, D. I., & Bever, T. G. (1982). Children use canonical sentence schemas: A crosslinguistic study of word order and inflections. Cognition, 12, 229-265.

Su, Y-c. (2006). Word order effect in children's garden path of relative clauses. Concentric:Studies in Linguistics, 32 (2), 33-57.

Treiman, R. Clifton, C.Jr. Meyer, A. S & Wurm, L. H. (2003). Language comprehension and production. To appear in A.F. Healy & R.W. Proctor (Eds.), Comprehensive handbook of psychology, 4, 527-548: Experimental Psychology. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Trudeau, N. Morford, J. P & Sutton, A. (2010). The Role of Word Order in the Interpretation of Canonical and Non-Canonical Graphic Symbol Utterances: A Developmental Study. Augmentative and Alternative Communication, 26 (2), 108–121.

Trueswell, J. C. Sekerina, I. Hill, N. M & Logrip, L. M. (1999). The kindergarten-path effect: studying on-line sentence processing in young children. Cognition, 73, 89-134.

Urosevic,Z. Carello, C. Savic, M. Lukatela, G & Turvey, M. T. (1986). Some word order effects in Serbo-Croat. Language and Speech, 29, 177-195.

Weighall. A. R & Altmann. G. T. M. (2010). The role of working memory and contextual constraints in children’s processing of relative clauses. J. Child Lang, 1-27.

Widdowson, H. G. (1978): Teaching Language as Communication. Oxford University Press.

Xiaorong, Z. (2007). Resumptive Pronouns in the Acquisition of English Relative Clauses by Chinese EFL learners. MA Thesis.