Papers by Roumyana Slabakova
Bilingualism-language and Cognition, 2005
Two major mechanisms of encoding telicity across languages are either marking the object as exhau... more Two major mechanisms of encoding telicity across languages are either marking the object as exhaustively countable or measurable, or utilizing a specific prefix on the verbal form. English predominantly uses the first mechanism, while Russian mostly utilizes the second. The learning task of an English speaker acquiring Russian, then, is twofold: to learn each individual verb with its subset of perfective prefixes, and to acquire knowledge of the fact that most prefixed verbs denote telic events. Sixty-six English-speaking learners of Russian as well as 45 controls took an on-line test of semantic interpretation. Results indicate that some low intermediate learners, and the majority of high intermediate and advanced learners are highly accurate in interpreting Russian telicity marking. It is argued that the difficulty in acquiring Russian aspect lies in learning the lexical items signaling telicity, but crucially NOT in learning the grammatical mechanism for telicity marking. * I am indebted to all individuals who took the experimental tests online. I gratefully acknowledge funding for the study from the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies of the University of Iowa International Programs. In particular, I would like to thank Bill Reisinger and Liz Constantine, Olga Petrova and Yola Kallestinova for native-speaker help with the test, as well as Natasha Voropaeva for setting up the experiment.
Studies in Second Language Acquisition
This article has two main goals. The first is to summarize and comment on the current state of af... more This article has two main goals. The first is to summarize and comment on the current state of affairs of generative approaches to SLA (GenSLA), 35 years into its history. This discussion brings the readership of SSLA up to date on the questions driving GenSLA agendas and clears up misconceptions about what GenSLA does and does not endeavor to explain. We engage key questions, debates, and shifts within GenSLA such as focusing on the deterministic role of input in language acquisition, as well as expanding the inquiry to new populations and empirical methodologies and technologies used. The second goal is to highlight the place of GenSLA in the broader field of SLA. We argue that various theories of SLA are needed, showing that many existing SLA paradigms are much less mutually exclusive than commonly believed (cf. Rothman & VanPatten, 2013; Slabakova, Leal, & Liskin-Gasparro, 2014, 2015; VanPatten & Rothman, 2014)—especially considering their different foci and research questions.
This paper investigates the claim that the native grammar of the learners is the initial state of... more This paper investigates the claim that the native grammar of the learners is the initial state of second language acquisition, as far as the acquisition of Universal Grammar parameters is concerned. Two opposing views on L1 transfer are discussed: the first hypothesis maintains that learners start out with the L1 parameter value (Schwartz & Sprouse's 1994, 1996 Full Transfer/Full Access Hypothesis) while the second hypothesis argues that L1 transfer plays no role in the acquisition process (Epstein, Flynn & Martohardjono 1996's Direct Access Hypothesis). The parameter under investigation is the Aspect Parameter, postulating two different ways in which languages mark telicity in the verbal phrase. The research design of the experimental study involves examining the competence of two groups of low intermediate learners of English, native speakers of Spanish, a language sharing the same parameter value with English, and of Bulgarian, a language exhibiting the opposite parametric value. Results indicate that the differences in the performance of learners from the two language groups are directly traceable to their native language. Thus the Full Transfer hypothesis receives experimental support. * I am indebted to Silvina Montrul for arranging the testing in Argentina.
The Modern Language Journal, 2015
This article reports on an experimental study addressing the second language acquisition of Manda... more This article reports on an experimental study addressing the second language acquisition of Mandarin temporality. Mandarin Chinese does not mark past, present, or future with dedicated morphemes; the native English of the learners does. It was hypothesized that, in their comprehension, learners would utilize the deictic pattern of expressing temporality, which postulates that bounded events tend to be interpreted as past and unbounded events as present. Twenty-eight bilingual native speakers, 25 intermediate learners, and 23 advanced learners of Mandarin with English as their native language took three different interpretation tests. Learners' temporal interpretation choices were highly accurate even at intermediate levels of proficiency, suggesting that obeying the deictic pattern in second language comprehension is not hard. Pedagogical implications of these findings are discussed.
Applied Linguistics, 2015
This is a response to Kees de Bot's reaction to our Forum article "We Have Moved On: Cur... more This is a response to Kees de Bot's reaction to our Forum article "We Have Moved On: Current Concepts and Positions in Generative SLA", Applied Linguistics 2014: 1–7, doi:10.1093/applin/amu027. It will appear in the same journal.
In this article, I will present partial results of three experiments that deal with the second la... more In this article, I will present partial results of three experiments that deal with the second language (L2) acquisition of the same phenomenon: Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD) in Spanish and Bulgarian by native English speakers. This is the phenomenon where an object that is previously mentioned in the discourse (a Topic) moves to the beginning of the sentence, and is doubled by a clitic agreeing with it in person, number, and gender. Because the acceptability of this word order depends on the previous discourse, this linguistic construction is evaluated at the interface of syntax and discourse. The Interface Hypothesis (Sorace & Serratrice, 2009; Sorace, 2011) argues that acquisition of such constructions present possibly insurmountable problems even in very advanced L2 speakers. I will discuss findings from Valenzuela (2005, 2006), Ivanov (2009), and Slabakova, Kempchinsky & Rothman (in revision), which demonstrate successful acquisition of Bulgarian and Spanish topicalization constructions. I will show that all these findings argue against a strong version of the Interface Hypothesis, and I will discuss why acquisition of this type is interesting to study.
The 3rd Annual Workshop on Formal Approaches to …, 1994
The study investigates the relationship between input, UG (Universal Grammar) parameter values, a... more The study investigates the relationship between input, UG (Universal Grammar) parameter values, and the native language in the acquisition of a purely semantic property that is superficially unrelated to its syntactic trigger, The Bare Noun/Proper Name parameter (Longobardi, 1991; 1994; 1996; 2001; 2005). On the one hand, English and Italian bare nouns have identical syntactic form and distribution, but differ in available interpretations. On the other hand, proper names display cross-linguistic constant meaning but variable word order. Variation in this respect can be accounted for by a parameter that is set to one value in English and another one in Italian. A bidirectional study of the two properties was conducted. Individual results calculated with the native speaker accuracy as the cutoff point for successful acquisition indicate that parametric restructuring is attested in both learning directions. In the English → Italian direction, the lack of one native interpretation in the target language (a contracting of the grammar) is achieved in the absence of negative evidence, in a Poverty of the Stimulus situation. In both directions, the semantic property is acquired based on input and/or positive evidence for the syntactic side of the parameter.
In this paper, I will address the following questions: Do perfective prefixes express lexical or ... more In this paper, I will address the following questions: Do perfective prefixes express lexical or grammatical aspect? Are they a homogeneous group, and if not, what types are there? How can they be analyzed in terms of phrase structure? I will also very briefly review recent work on how are they represented in the mental lexicon of native speakers, how they are acquired by children learning their first language and adults learning a second language, and what they mark in attrited grammars.
ABSTRACT , pertaining to two meanings. Knowledge of unavailability of certain meanings, as well a... more ABSTRACT , pertaining to two meanings. Knowledge of unavailability of certain meanings, as well as of ungrammaticality is also part of the final state grammar. In the absence of negative evidence, there must be an innate language faculty constraining knowledge of syntactic and semantic interpretations in L1 acquisition. The strong UG hypothesis assumes that adult L2 acquisition is also constrained by UG. As seen above, UG constrains both the syntactic form and the semantic interpretation of sentences. Most of the existing research in L2 acquisition has concentrated predominantly on the formal syntactic properties of interlanguage grammars. The present experiment tests the strong UG hypothesis in the acquisition of meaning. This type of research has been pioneered by Dekydtspotter and Sprouse's investigations of the syntax-semantics interface. Dekydtspotter, Sprouse & Anderson (1997) and Dekydtspotter, Sprouse & Leininger (1999) provide empirical evidence showing that L2 learners of Fre
Second Language Research, 2006
The study investigates the relationship between input, UG (Universal Grammar) parameter values, a... more The study investigates the relationship between input, UG (Universal Grammar) parameter values, and the native language in the acquisition of a purely semantic property that is superficially unrelated to its syntactic trigger, The Bare Noun/Proper Name parameter (Longobardi, 1991; 1994; 1996; 2001; 2005). On the one hand, English and Italian bare nouns have identical syntactic form and distribution, but differ in available interpretations. On the other hand, proper names display cross-linguistic constant meaning but variable word order. Variation in this respect can be accounted for by a parameter that is set to one value in English and another one in Italian. A bidirectional study of the two properties was conducted. Individual results calculated with the native speaker accuracy as the cutoff point for successful acquisition indicate that parametric restructuring is attested in both learning directions. In the English → Italian direction, the lack of one native interpretation in the target language (a contracting of the grammar) is achieved in the absence of negative evidence, in a Poverty of the Stimulus situation. In both directions, the semantic property is acquired based on input and/or positive evidence for the syntactic side of the parameter.
Uploads
Papers by Roumyana Slabakova