Foreigner-directed speech is simpler than native-directed: Evidence from social media

Abstract

I test two hypotheses that play an important role in modern sociolinguistics and language evolution studies: first, that non-native production is simpler than native; second, that production addressed to non-native speakers is simpler than that addressed to natives. The second hypothesis is particularly important for theories about contact-induced simplification, since the accommodation to non-natives may explain how the simplification can spread from adult learners to the whole community. To test the hypotheses, I create a very large corpus of native and non-native written speech in four languages (English, French, Italian, Spanish), extracting data from an internet forum where native languages of the participants are known and the structure of the interactions can be inferred. The corpus data yield inconsistent evidence with respect to the first hypothesis, but largely support the second one, suggesting that foreigner-directed speech is indeed simpler than native-directed. Importantly, when testing the first hypothesis, I contrast production of different speakers, which can introduce confounds and is a likely reason for the inconsistencies. When testing the second hypothesis, the comparison is always within the production of the same speaker (but with different addressees), which makes it more reliable.

Imperfect language learning reduces morphological overspecification: Experimental evidence

“…The potential connection between contact intensity or, specifically, between the relative proportions of adult and child learners in the population, and complexity decrease seems to be more straightforward and its descriptions are better fleshed out. Bentz and Winter [21] list three potential mechanisms of contact-induced case loss, which can be generalized to other instances of morphological simplification: (i) imperfect acquisition by adult learners; (ii) the tendency of native speakers to reduce morphosyntactic complexity of their speech when talking to foreigners [47,57]; (iii) the tendency of loan words to combine with more productive inflections, forcing the least productive ones out [58]. We focus on mechanism (i), which is the explanation most commonly entertained in the typological, sociolinguistic and evolutionary literature [28].…”

El corpus de aprendices japoneses CELEN y su aplicación a la docencia y la investigación en ELE

“…Por último, incluimos también datos del corpus WordReference (Berdicevskis, 2020), que contiene los mensajes publicados en los foros de lengua del mismo nombre, por aprendices de cuatro idiomas (inglés, español, francés e italiano). Seleccionamos los mensajes de los hablantes de japonés como L1 publicados en el foro Sólo español (https://forum.wordreference.com/forums/sólo-español.45/), unas 50.000 palabras en total, e incorporamos a CELEN una muestra de hasta 5.000 palabras por autor.…”