Visual attention and quantifier-spreading in heritage Russian bilinguals

Sekerina, Irina A.; Sauermann, Antje

doi:10.1177/0267658314537292

Cited by 17 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…This phenomenon has been attested in dozens of experiments among speakers of English (Bucci 1978;Philip 1995;Brooks & Braine 1996;Crain et al 1996;Roeper et al 2011), Dutch (Philip & Coopmans 1995;Drozd & van Loosbroek 1999;Hollebrandse 2004;Hollebrandse & Smits 2005;Philip 2011), Turkish (Freeman & Stedmon 1986), Russian (Sekerina & Sauermann 2015), Hungarian (Gyuris 1996), Korean (Kang 1999), Japanese (O'Grady et al 2010;Minai et al 2012), Norwegian, Spanish, and French (Philip 2011), etc. It has been found to be most common among preschoolers, but it has also been attested among older children (Philip 2011), as well as English adults and adult speakers of heritage Russian (Brooks & Sekerina 2005Sekerina & Sauermann 2015). The variability of the rate of its occurrence is exceptionally high; in some experiments, the percentage of quantifier spreading among young children was above 80% (Philip 2011: 366), in some others, it was below 15% (Crain et al 1996: 127) -depending on the age of the participants, and crucially, on the stimuli used in the experiments.…”

Section: The Phenomenonmentioning

confidence: 84%

“…Nevertheless, even adults can fall prey to the ostensive effect of psycholinguistic stimuli, as shown by our experiment testing exhaustive interpretation. Quantifier Spreading, too, has also been attested among adults using their heritage language (Sekerina & Sauermann 2015). The fact that these adults used a language which they did not control perfectly, and which made extra demands on their grammatical and other cognitive resources presumably made them more exposed to the observed effect.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Quantifier spreading: children misled by ostensive cues

Kiss

Zétényi

2017

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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This paper calls attention to a methodological problem of acquisition experiments. It shows that the economy of the stimulus employed in child language experiments may lend an increased ostensive effect to the message communicated to the child. Thus, when the visual stimulus in a sentence-picture matching task is a minimal model abstracting away from the details of the situation, children often regard all the elements of the stimulus as ostensive clues to be represented in the corresponding sentence. The use of such minimal stimuli is mistaken when the experiment aims to test whether or not a certain element of the stimulus is relevant for the linguistic representation or interpretation. The paper illustrates this point by an experiment involving quantifier spreading. It is claimed that children find a universally quantified sentence like Every girl is riding a bicycle to be a false description of a picture showing three girls riding bicycles and a solo bicycle because they are misled to believe that all the elements in the visual stimulus are relevant, hence all of them are to be represented by the corresponding linguistic description. When the iconic drawings were replaced by photos taken in a natural environment rich in accidental details, the occurrence of quantifier spreading was radically reduced. It is shown that an extra object in the visual stimulus can lead to the rejection of the sentence also in the case of sentences involving no quantification, which gives further support to the claim that the source of the problem is not (or not only) the grammatical or cognitive difficulty of quantification but the unintended ostensive effect of the extra object.

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Section: The Phenomenonmentioning

confidence: 84%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifier spreading: children misled by ostensive cues

Kiss

Zétényi

2017

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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“…Due to the developmental limitations, the children's experiment was simpler (i.e., only two conditions and 48 fillers) than the adults' (three conditions and 66 fillers). The adult experiment in its entire form is reported in Sekerina and Sauermann (2015). Here, for the control monolingual adult group, we provide only the necessary details for a meaningful comparison with the child data.…”

Section: The Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifier spreading in child eye movements: A case of the Russian quantifier <i>kazhdyj</i> ‘every'

Sekerina

Sauermann

2017

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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Extensive cross-linguistic work has documented that children up to the age of 9-10 make errors when performing a sentence-picture verification task that pairs spoken sentences with the universal quantifier every and pictures with entities in partial one-to-one correspondence. These errors stem from children's difficulties in restricting the domain of a universal quantifier to the appropriate noun phrase and are referred in the literature as quantifier-spreading (q-spreading). We adapted the task to be performed in conjunction with eye-movement recordings using the Visual World Paradigm. Russian-speaking 5-to-6-year-old children (N = 31) listened to sentences like Kazhdyj alligator lezhit v vanne 'Every alligator is lying in a bathtub' and viewed pictures with three alligators, each in a bathtub, and two extra empty bathtubs. Non-spreader children (N = 12) were adult-like in their accuracy whereas q-spreading ones (N = 19) were only 43% correct in interpreting such sentences compared to the control sentences. Eye movements of q-spreading children revealed that more looks to the extra containers (two empty bathtubs) correlated with higher error rates reflecting the processing pattern of q-spreading. In contrast, more looks to the distractors in control sentences did not lead to errors in interpretation. We argue that q-spreading errors are caused by interference from the extra entities in the visual context, and our results support the processing difficulty account of acquisition of quantification. Interference results in cognitive overload as children have to integrate multiple sources of information, i.e., visual context with salient extra entities and the spoken sentence in which these entities are mentioned in real-time processing.

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“…Acquisition and processing of Slavic languages as heritage languages, represented mostly by Russian, is unfortunately missing from this special issue. This is despite the fact that HL Russian research occupies a very prominent position in the field of bilingualism thanks to the work of Maria Polinsky (University of Maryland) (see Polinky 2006 for an overview) and some of my own (Sekerina and Sauermann 2015). Acquired (aphasia) and developmental (specific language impairment, SLI) language impairments in Slavic languages also known as neurolinguistics have made substantial gains as well.…”

Section: Populationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Wagner and colleagues (2013) investigated phonotactic constraints that regulate consonant clusters in Polish. In psychosemantics, Slavic data have been used to study animacy in Serbian (Radanović, Westbury, and Milin 2016), comparative properties of quantifiers in Bulgarian and Polish (Tomaszewicz 2013), and quantifier scope in Russian (Ionin and Luchkina 2015;Sekerina and Sauermann 2015).…”

Section: Predictive Role Of Morphosyntaxmentioning

confidence: 99%

Slavic Psycholinguistics in the 21st Century

Sekerina¹

2017

Journal of Slavic Linguistics

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This article provides an update on research in Slavic psycholinguistics since 2000 following my first review (Sekerina 2006), published as a position paper for the workshop The Future of Slavic Linguistics in America (SLING2K). The focus remains on formal experimental psycholinguistics understood in the narrow sense, i.e., experimental studies conducted with monolingual healthy adults. I review five dimensions characteristic of Slavic psycholinguistics-populations, methods, domains, theoretical approaches, and specific languages-and summarize the experimental data from Slavic languages published in general non-Slavic psycholinguistic journals and proceedings from the leading two conferences on Slavic linguistics, FASL and FDSL, since 2000. I argue that the current research trends in Slavic psycholinguistics are (1) a shift from adult monolingual participants to special population groups, such as children, people with aphasia, and bilingual learners, (2) a continuing move in the direction of cognitive neuroscience, with more emphasis on online experimental techniques, such as eye-tracking and neuroimaging, and (3) a focus on Slavic-specific phenomena that contribute to the ongoing debates in general psycholinguistics. The current infrastructural trends are (1) development of psycholinguistic databases and resources for Slavic languages and (2) a rise of psycholinguistic research conducted in Eastern European countries and disseminated in Slavic languages. * I wish to thank two anonymous reviewers and Catherine Rudin for their helpful comments and especially suggestions regarding additional sources. All the mistakes are, of course, mine.

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Visual attention and quantifier-spreading in heritage Russian bilinguals

Cited by 17 publications

References 34 publications

Quantifier spreading: children misled by ostensive cues

Quantifier spreading: children misled by ostensive cues

Quantifier spreading in child eye movements: A case of the Russian quantifier <i>kazhdyj</i> ‘every'

Slavic Psycholinguistics in the 21st Century

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