EAPSI: Do Abstract Syntactic Representations Help Adult Second Language Learners Acquire Novel Word Types?

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Some words do not directly translate into other languages. For example, where an English speaker would say either "John heard that Bill praised himself/him," depending on who is being praised, a Japanese speaker would say roughly "John-ga Bill-wa praised self heard-that," and mean either John or Bill was being praised. Him, himself, and the Japanese self are examples of anaphora, words that refer back to already-mentioned linguistic information (e.g. Bill or John). The use of anaphora is partly constrained by universal, syntactic principles, but also language-specific rules. This project investigates whether learners can develop native-like understanding of these cross-linguistically varied constructions from mere exposure, and if so what information is relevant and influential. This project, conducted in collaboration with Dr. Hajime Ono at Tsuda College, will form a cross-linguistic data-set that will allow the researchers to better understand the linguistic factors that enhance or reduce adults' ability to learn new words and grammatical constructions. Results from this project should provide insight into the kind of information that is especially relevant or influential in helping adults learn a new language. This project seeks to better understand the nature of language learning mechanisms, and whether abstract syntactic representations can be used to acquire the correct interpretations of novel anaphora. Anaphora in both Japanese and English are constrained by universal principles, but language-specific parameters must also be learned. This project uses a novel language learning task developed by the awardee to test if the learning mechanism can track repeated co-occurrences of a word-form, syntactic representation, and context-based interpretations in order to map that word-form to the correct anaphora type, which will increase our understanding of the role of syntactic representations in the language acquisition process.This award under the East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes program supports summer research by a U.S. graduate student and is jointly funded by NSF and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.