What’s in the Textbook and What’s in the Mind

Abstract

This paper presents an experimental study of the rarely explored question of how input via instruction interacts with L2 acquisition at the level of modular linguistic knowledge. The investigation focuses on L2 knowledge of the English polarity item any, whose properties are only partially covered by typical language-teaching materials. We investigate Najdi-Saudi Arabic-speaking learners' knowledge of the distribution of any in contexts that are taught, contexts that are not taught but may be observable in the input, and contexts that are neither taught nor observable. We further test whether conscious awareness of instructed rules about any correlates with performance. Our findings suggest a role for instruction and also for internal, UG-constrained acquisition, and that these two paths interact. We explore our findings in terms of Sharwood Smith and Truscott's (2014a, 2014b) framework of modular online growth and use of language, in which cognitive development is driven by processing.

The meaning of negation in the second language classroom: Evidence from ‘any’

“…By contrast, in the English control group, accuracy is uniformly high (≥3.6; see Table 3) and there were no significant differences in accuracy within each grammatical-ungrammatical pair (Marsden et al, 2017). …”

“…Our own recent research on NPI any in second language acquisition, contrasts knowledge of the properties of the explicit negator not with that of lexical items that are implicitly negative (Marsden, Whong & Gil, 2017). Briefly (with detail to follow in the next section), this research reveals that the acquisition of the NPI-licensing ability of the two types of negator does not proceed in parallel for second language learners.…”

“…We begin by illustrating the linguistic properties of any, showing how they are inherently tied to grammatical properties of negation. This is followed by an overview of Arabic-speaking learners' knowledge of the NPI any (Marsden et al, 2017), followed by new data on Chinese-speaking learners' knowledge of any, and an analysis of the presentation of negation and any in English language textbooks. We bring the 2 See Whong et al (2014) for a criticism of the conceptualization of linguistic properties in the metaanalysis by Spada and Tomita (2010).…”

“…In the next sub-section, we outline the findings of the study of Arabicspeaking learners (Marsden et al, 2017).…”

Polarity-item anything in L3 English: Where does transfer come from when the L1 is Catalan and the L2 is Spanish?

“…6 Tubau (2008) suggests that in certain contexts such as a subjunctive dependent one the [uPol:_] can also be valued as [uPol: Modal] by the Polarity head of the matrix clause. 7 Another study that investigates non-native acquisition of any is Marsden et al (2017), but this study does not investigate transfer, therefore the findings do not bear on this issue. 8 Table 2 showed that Catalan and Spanish also differ from English in terms of phase structure and PF operations.…”