Project 7

Artificial language learning as a window to the early entrenchment of constructions

This project examines the roles of frequency and semantic transparency on the learning and entrenchment of constructions in first and second language acquisition. First, in a series of studies, we focus on the comprehension by child and adult native speakers of Spanish of different variant forms of object relatives in Spanish (e.g., el niño (al) que el abuelo abraza ‘the boy that the grandpa is hugging’) that differ in terms of absolute frequency in oral discourse (Butler, 1992) and transparency of grammatical role assignment (Slobin, 1973). Crucially, this focus on highly similar syntactic structures not only allows for putting the two factors of interest in opposition in a controlled manner, but also provides experimental evidence informing the debate about how to determine what constitutes one (and the same) construction within a CxG framework.

Secondly, we resort to an artificial language learning paradigm (e.g., Pili-Moss, Brill-Schuetz, Faretta-Stutenberg & Morgan-Short 2020; Rebuschat, Monahan & Schoetensack, 2021) in order to be able to systematically manipulate linguistic factors during the earliest stages of L2 acquisition. Novel grammatical structures in the new language will include manipulations of semantic transparency in the form of optional redundant case markers which will be presented at different frequency ratios. Furthermore, the phonetic salience of the markers will also be manipulated. This will provide further insights on the interplay between amount of exposure, overt grammatical marking and phonetic salience in the emergence of constructional knowledge.

In sum, this project aims to tease apart the relative influences of factors that are known to separately facilitate the acquisition of constructions yet are likely to interact in situations of syntactic variation, contributing thus to our understanding of the factors that shape constructional entrenchment and to the discussion around the concept of construction itself.

This project is done by Sara Fernández-Santos and is supervised by Dr. Miguel Llompart Garcia and Prof. Dr. Ewa Dabrowska.