Language use strategies(1)

언어 활용 전략

How First and Second Language Learners Use Predictive Cues
in Online Sentence Interpretation in Spanish and English

When utilizing a new language, what strategies are employed?

Pre-existing research on how spoken language is understood yields the following findings:

First, adults process speech incrementally. This means they do not wait for the end of a word or sentence; instead, they begin to interpret information as it becomes available, one piece at a time(Marslen-Wilson & Zwitserlood, 1989). For example, when listeners hear the syllables of the word "trespass," they gradually understand it as the most likely word without confusing it with other English words at a certain point.

Second, adults integrate various types of information, including phonetic, prosodic, semantic, structural, and discourse-level cues. With the increasing use of eye-tracking techniques in research(Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard, & Sedivy, 1995), the impact of visual context on how listeners interpret speech continues to be explored.

Meanwhile, this research poses the following questions regarding infants learning Spanish as their first language, adults learning it as a foreign language, and adult native Spanish speakers:

How do language learners begin
to make use of their emerging linguistic knowledge
to facilitate interpretation of known words in fluent speech?

The research question asks how "early linguistic knowledge is utilized in fluent language use" and specifically how this utilization "begins."

The following section will briefly summarize the research methods and outline implications based on the findings.

Reference

Lew-Williams, C., & Fernald, A. (2008). How first and second language learners use predictive cues in online sentence interpretation in Spanish and English. Proceedings of the 31st Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development.

https://babylab.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/papers/Lew-WilliamsFernald2007-BU.pdf