Employing General Linguistic Knowledge in Incidental Acquisition of Grammatical Properties of New L1 and L2 Lexical Representations: Toward Reducing Fuzziness in the Initial Ontogenetic Stage

Abstract

The study explores the degree to which readers can use their previous linguistic knowledge, which goes beyond the immediate evidence in the input, to create mental representations of new words and how the employment of this knowledge may reduce the fuzziness of the new representations. Using self-paced reading, initial representations of novel identical forms with different grammatical functions were compared in native German speakers and advanced L2 German learners with L1 Czech. The results reveal that although both groups can employ general knowledge about German grammar when establishing new representations, the L1 native speakers outperform the L2 learners: Their new representations have more precise structure and are better differentiated from related representations with respect to their grammatical information. Modeling consequences of these findings are discussed in the context of the Ontogenesis Model of the L2 Lexical Representation and the Fuzzy Lexical Representation Hypothesis.

Mental Representation of Word Family Structure: The Case of German Infinitives, Conversion Nouns and Other Morphologically Related Forms

“…To our knowledge, with the exception of several studies by Bordag et al ( Bordag and Opitz, 2021 , 2022 ; Opitz and Bordag, 2021 ), there is no research in German that would systematically explore the relation between infinitives and conversion nouns or between them and other morphologically related words. In particular, conversion nouns have not been employed in previous research.…”