Processing Strategies in L2 Learners of French: The Role of Transfer

Abstract

This study compared the comprehension processing strategies of 15 monolingual English native speakers and 8 bilingual French native speakers to 112 second language (L2) learners of French, using stimuli containing word order and clitic pronoun (type and agreement) cues in French. Results indicated differential dependence on cue use by the two native speaker groups, with English native speakers depending more on word order for interpretation and French native speaker depending more on clitic pronoun agreement. Interpretations produced by L2 learners of French indicated an immediate abandonment of LI word order strategies with a much later onset of clitic pronoun agreement strategies. Results are discussed within the framework of the Competition Model.

A la recherche des clitiques perdus: The dictogloss as a measure of the comprehension of y and en by L2 learners of French

“…Previous research indicates that adult NSs of French use animacy and agreement cues to interpret sentences in their L1 (McDonald & Heilenman, 1992). In contrast, beginning-and intermediate-level L2 learners of French (whose L1 is English) rely upon clitic case inflection, verb agreement, and noun animacy to a much lesser extent in sentence interpretation; instead, these learners favour effective L1 processing strategies, such as using word order to assign agent and patient roles (Heilenman & McDonald, 1993). From a competition-model perspective, y and en are costly cues to interpret to begin with, because they are unstressed forms that are difficult to perceive and because assignment of meaning is complicated by often distant agreement cues (e.g., spanning a number of sentence constituents or even sentence boundaries).…”

Crosslinguistic Influence: Transfer to Nowhere?

“…(The reader is referred to Ellis (1994) and Gass and Selinker (1994) and references therein for more detail.) What emerges from these studies is that the assignment of functions like Agent/Subject and Patient/Object to forms in utterances may very largely follow the pattern dictated by the LI, especially when learners are not very advanced (e.g., Gass 1987;, Harrington 1987, Heilenman and McDonald 1993, Kilborn 1989, Kilborn and Cooreman 1987, Kilborn and Ito 1989, McDonald and Heilenman 1991, Sasaki 1991. In English, word order seems to be the principle determinant of Subjecthood (Bates, et al 1982); in other languages, other cues play bigger roles.…”

Multiple Constraints on Processing Ambiguous Sentences: Evidence From Adult L2 Learners

“…On the other hand, if Example 7 is preceded, for instance, by When I drove by a gas station the other day, there was a brand new gasoline can lying nearby, this "immediately accessible contextual information" (Wilson & Sperber, 1991, p. 594) will guide the hearerheader toward interpreting that in Example 7 as a demonstrative determiner. Second language (L2) research in sentence processing has typically examined L2 learners' processing strategies (e.g., Heilenman & McDonald, 1993;Kilborn & Ito, 1989;Liu, Bates, & Li, 1992;McDonald & Heilenman, 1991;Sasaki, 1991;Vaid & Pandit, 1991;Wulfeck, Juarez, Bates, & Kilborn, 1986) within the framework of the competition model (e.g., Bates & MacWhinney, 1989;MacWhinney, 1987aMacWhinney, , 1987b, the use of L1 strategies in L2 sentence processing (e.g., Gass, 1987;Harrington, 1987;Kilborn, 1989;Kilborn & Cooreman, 1987;MacWhinney, 1992;Miao, 198l), and the use of cues in L2 sentence interpretations (e.g., Harley, Howard, & Hart, 1995;Kail, 1989;Kilborn, 1994). (For an overview of L2 processing theory, see Bialystok, 1990.…”