Reduced Competition Effects and Noisier Representations in a Second Language

Abstract

Native speakers strongly disprefer novel formulations when a conventional alternative expresses the same intended message, presumably because the more conventional form competes with the novel form. In five studies, second language (L2) speakers were less influenced by competing alternatives than native speakers. L2 speakers accepted novel interpretable sentences more readily than native speakers, and were somewhat less likely to offer competing alternatives as paraphrases or to prefer competing alternatives in forced‐choice tasks. They were unaffected by exposure to competing alternatives immediately before judgments. Reduced sensitivity to competing alternatives was confirmed by L2 speakers’ greater divergence from native speakers on judgments for novel formulations compared to familiar ones. Reduced sensitivity to competing alternatives also predicts noisier linguistic representations; consistent with this, L2 speakers performed worse on a verbatim recognition task, with performance correlating with more nativelike judgments. Proficiency was a modest predictor of judgments, but transfer effects were not. Open Practices This article has been awarded a Preregistered Research Design badge. Preregistration for this study's research design and analyses is publicly accessible through AsPredicted.org. Direct links to the five preregistered experiments are available in the Supporting Information file. Learn more about the Open Practices badges from the Center for Open Science: https://osf.io/tvyxz/wiki.

Bifurcations and the Emergence of L2 Syntactic Structures in a Complex Dynamic System

“…With continued exposure to English, and because the learner is motivated to participate in the dominant social group, he notices a discrepancy between what he is producing and what he perceives through experience, in so doing making an inference which triggers the first bifurcation in his L2 development. However, the fact that L2 learners exhibit reduced sensitivity to competing alternatives, possibly due to limited attentional resources, means that the more contextually dominant 3 form is not always immediately selected (Tachihara and Goldberg, 2020).…”

Chapter 7. What can syntactic priming tell us about crosslinguistic influence?

“…The reason for CLI, i.e. not using the most appropriate form-meaning mapping in a given language, is connected to how well entrenched a given construction is for the bilingual speaker in that language, and how effectively entrenchment can pre-empt the use of an unconventional form to express a given meaning (Ambridge & Brandt, 2013;Boyd & Goldberg, 2011;Tachihara & Goldberg, 2020). In the case of bilingual children who are simultaneously acquiring two languages, or who are early learners of a second language, the extent to which language-specific knowledge is well entrenched will inevitably be determined by how much relative exposure they've had in their two languages and by the contexts of exposure (e.g.…”