Tracking the early stages of child and adult comprehension of L2 morphosyntax: A pilot study

Abstract

A number of studies in SLA and developmental psychology have shown that both children and adults can acquire nonnative word orders after a relatively short amount of exposure to a miniature language with natural-syntax characteristics in implicit instruction conditions. Although there is some evidence that in these conditions adult L2 learning can extend to morphemes (e.g., gender, case), little attention has been given to child-learning of morphology to date. In this pilot study six nine-year-olds and eight adults (all L1 English monolinguals) were exposed over three consecutive days to auditory sentence stimuli in BrocantoJ, a miniature language mirroring the word order and morphology of Japanese, in the context of a computer game similar to chess. Accuracy in performing a game move after hearing a sentence stimulus that described it, and accuracy in a forced-choice task, were used as measures of overall language comprehension and comprehension of the relationship between an argument's syntactic realization and its thematic function (linking). The data showed that both groups performed significantly above chance overall and on linking rules. However, adults performed significantly better than children in the first two sessions (p < 0.01), though the gap disappeared by the third day. Also, initial evidence showed that, at least for a subset of the sentence stimuli, both children and adults were successfully relying exclusively on case marking to interpret NP thematic functions.

Cognitive Predictors of Child Second Language Comprehension and Syntactic Learning

“…Table 6 shows the percentage accuracy scores in the comprehension task overall and by block, and Figure 7 shows the density distribution of the overall accuracy scores ( z ‐skewness = 1.93; z ‐kurtosis = –.117). Following the practice of previous studies that adopted the same game paradigm (e.g., Morgan‐Short et al., 2014; Pili‐Moss, 2017), the level of chance performance in the game was defined for each trial as the ratio of all possible correct moves to all possible moves that could be made by the game token that had the function of subject in the sentence (Morgan‐Short, 2007, p. 143) and set at 14% accuracy.…”

“…The participants had all started to learn English as a L2 in the classroom from Grade 1. An age range between 8 and 9 years was selected based on evidence of learning from a pilot study (Pili‐Moss, 2017) and in view of the fact that the game task was considered too complex for children any younger than 8 years old. The study was approved by the Ethics Research Committee of Lancaster University, and parental consent to participate was obtained for all participants prior to the beginning of the study.…”

“…Game tokens and constellations corresponding to Examples 1 (a, in the figure), 2, and 3 (b/c, in the figure) provided in the section Artificial Language of the text. Adapted from Pili‐Moss (2017, p. 116).…”

What can artificial languages reveal about morphosyntactic processing in bilinguals?

“…Relatedly, it will be important to integrate individual differences research with artificial language approaches in order to capture the effects of inter-individual variation on bilingual L3 morphosyntactic processing. Finally, this review focused on adult bilingual morphosyntactic processing, and the artificial language approaches highlighted herein will also be valuable for investigating similar topics related to child bilingual L3 processing (for a review on artificial language work in child L2 research, see Pili-Moss, 2017).…”

Cognitive predictors of child second language comprehension and syntactic learning

“…The participants had all started to learn English as a L2 in the classroom from Grade 1. An age range between 8 and 9 years was selected based on evidence of learning from a pilot study (Pili-Moss, 2017) and in view of the fact that the game task was considered too complex for children any younger than 8 years old. The study was approved by the Ethics Research Committee of Lancaster University, and parental consent to participate was obtained for all participants prior to the beginning of the study.…”