Language use strategies(2)
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What are the strategies for utilizing a new language?
To obtain answers to this, the study utilized the "Looking-While-Listening" (LWL) procedure (Fernald et al., 1998; Fernald et al., 2006).
The "Looking-While-Listening" (LWL) procedure was used with both child and adult participants in Experiments 1 and 2, and this real-time method aims to track how people understand spoken language. Participants view two pictures while listening to a recorded voice that names one of the pictures.
For example, if a participant is looking at the target picture of a ball and hears the sentence "Find the ball," they should continue to look at the ball since there is no additional information directing them elsewhere. However, if they are looking at the distracter picture of a shoe while hearing the same sentence, they should shift their gaze to the target picture of the ball.
Participants' eye movements are recorded in specific time intervals (frames) of 33 milliseconds by coders who are unaware of the type of trial. This data allows for the calculation of reaction time (RT), which is the time it takes for a participant to move their eyes toward the target image. Eye movements occurring in the first 300 milliseconds are excluded from the analysis, as this is the average time required to plan an eye movement (Haith, Wentworth, & Canfield, 1993).
**In Experiment 1**, the reaction time at the point in the speech stream where important acoustic information becomes available is measured. The crucial acoustic information here is the onset of gender-marked articles in Spanish. This occurs just before the target noun is mentioned, but it is when the article information starts to influence the participant's response.
**In Experiment 2**, the verb preceding the noun phrase (e.g., "ball") is particularly important. In this case, the reaction time is measured from the onset of the verb, determining how quickly participants shift their gaze to the target picture after hearing the verb.
Through these two experiments, the researchers aimed to understand at which points information is critical for comprehending spoken language and how this information influences gaze shifts.
Language learners utilize their initial language knowledge to understand or interpret the meaning of familiar words in natural, smooth conversations.
The findings of the research are as follows:
In Experiment 1, it was found that children learning Spanish as their first language rapidly utilized the information conveyed by short, unstressed gender-marked articles (e.g., "el" or "la") to interpret language. This ability is characteristic of native adult speakers but not observed in second-language learners.
The grammatical gender mentioned here (the characteristic of languages that categorize nouns and adjectives into masculine and feminine forms) helps people effectively interpret morphological and grammatical cues. In contrast, semantic cues may provide different approaches to predicting how language is heard.
In Experiment 2, the focus was on how children, native adults, and second-language adults use thematic information from verbs in both Spanish and English. Specifically, this experiment compared how people understand and predict the meaning of sentences through verbs.
The results of Experiment 2 showed that children learning Spanish, adults learning Spanish as a second language, and native Spanish-speaking adults were faster at interpreting sentences that contained semantically informative verbs related to subsequent nouns. This trend was also found among participants listening to English sentences. Additionally, processing speed varied across the three groups, showing an increase in speed from children to second-language adults to native adults.
Two important conclusions can be drawn: first, there was a gradual increase in sentence comprehension speed with age and experience, particularly as older and more experienced individuals tended to recognize words faster. For example, familiarity with frequently heard nouns helps individuals recognize those words more quickly.
The second major theme in the current research is the advantage of early language experience observed in the experiments testing real-time understanding of grammatical gender. The results align with established findings that second-language learners struggle more with syntactic judgments than with semantic judgments.
The language learning environment for children fosters very strong associations between gender-marked articles and nouns. This often leads them to initially think of the article as a prefix to the noun or as a bound morpheme that sounds like a single phonological word. In contrast, second-language learners may have limited exposure to articles and nouns used together. Much of their exposure to Spanish may consist of vocabulary lists, where each noun is followed by a parenthetical "f" or "m" denoting the noun class.
Additionally, second-language learners may create rules for memorizing noun class information and gain relatively little practice listening to and using language outside a classroom setting. This may lead second-language learners to simply wait until the noun begins to identify potential referents. The substantial differences in the nature and amount of input provided to children and second-language adults clarify why second-language adults may not readily use gender-marked articles in rapid sentence interpretation.
In summary, frequent exposure to language is recommended for children learning their first language, while memorization of rules and vocabulary lists is suggested for adults learning a foreign language.
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.
