Exploring Lexical Effects in Second Language Interpretation

Abstract

The Spanish mood contrast is a good test case for research on acquiring form-meaning connections in contexts where input is variable and multiple areas of the grammar are implicated (e.g., syntax, semantics, pragmatics). Nevertheless, research on interpretation of this contrast lags and little is known about how individual lexical items and patterns of co-occurrence of adverbial clauses with subjunctive forms influence interpretation. Addressing this void, we compare interpretation of the present subjunctive by native speakers (NSs) and nonnative speakers (NNSs) at three relatively high levels of experience. Participants completed an interpretation task containing clauses with indicative and subjunctive forms paired with one of six adverbial conjunctions, categorized as co-occurring with subjunctive, indicative, or both forms. Our analysis suggests individual lexical items play a role in morphosyntactic variation and that nuanced differences in interpretation exist for NSs and highly advanced NNSs, even on items that prescriptively co-occur with only one form.

Sociolinguistic Competence and Interpreting Variable Structures in a Second Language

“…Nevertheless, they also demonstrated lexically based interpretation in these smaller models, as they treated each adjective divergently within a given class, showing a rather sizable range within classes. In tandem, these results support prior work that has shown NSs to use patterns of collocation and to have a lexical basis for interpretation (Bybee, 2007, 2010; Edmonds & Gudmestad, 2014; Goldberg, 2013; Kanwit & Geeslin, 2014, 2018).…”

“…The learner tendencies to interpret estar as expressing the individual frame and to overshoot NS norms support prior research on the copula contrast (Geeslin, 2003; Geeslin & Guijarro-Fuentes, 2006). Learners overshooting NS norms in interpretation is also consistent with work on other structures (e.g., mood interpretation in Kanwit & Geeslin, 2014, 2018). Less differentiation based on individual adjectives for graduate learners is similar to prior work that has shown NSs to rely on collocations more than learners (Edmonds & Gudmestad, 2014) and for advanced learners to depend more on class than lexical item in interpretation (e.g., significant results for both individual adverb and mood for NSs, but only for mood for graduates in Kanwit & Geeslin, 2014).…”

“…Like that study, the current results support more general claims that in determining how to interpret a given structure, learner comprehension strategies may involve prioritizing cues that are less meaningful for NSs. For instance, chronological ordering of sentential elements occurs commonly cross-linguistically, but in determining which actions occur before others, NSs are likely to attend to temporality expressed in verbal morphology (Bardovi-Harlig, 2000; Kanwit & Geeslin, 2014, 2018), whereas learners may instead rely on the ordering of elements, assuming that information has been presented chronologically, which is especially the case at earlier, premorphological stages (i.e., pragmatic stages, Bardovi-Harlig, 2000).…”

“…Compared to NSs, the learners in general demonstrated less use of lexically specific patterns of interpretation and less distinction across different adverbs ( cuando “when,” hasta que “until,” después de que “after”). To more effectively investigate the role of individual adverbs and their patterns of co-occurrence, Kanwit and Geeslin (2018) created a new written instrument that manipulated three of the same factors (verbal mood, verbal morphological regularity, and the adverbial conjunction), but they increased the number of adverbs included from three to six and classified these adverbs according to their degree of variability and their frequency of occurrence, based on corpus data. Their analysis showed the influence of verbal mood from the intermediate level upward, as well as a high degree of variability based on individual lexical items and their patterns of co-occurrence with subjunctive and indicative moods.…”

Acquiring intensifier variation abroad: Exploring muy and bien in Spain and Mexico

“…These examples indicate that although the learner grammars may have shown important differences from the NS grammars following a stay abroad (e.g., invariable adjectives demonstrated the opposite directions of effect), learners did respond in a more native-like fashion at Time 2 across the majority of items in both sites. These examples also indicate differential behavior according to individual lexical items (i.e., the intensified adjectives), which has been reported in the acquisition of other variable structures such as mood expression within subtypes of adverbs that otherwise pattern together (Kanwit & Geeslin, 2017) and general lexical strategies that learners may exhibit when encountering variable forms in associating a lexical item with a particular variant (Quesada, 1998). Such lexical variability may relate to the frequency with which speakers encounter a particular item in the input, with more frequent items being acquired first (Bybee, 2006).…”