Project 7

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

(Third Party Funds Group – Sub project)

Abstract:

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. A follow-up of this experimental paradigm including word order variations in Spanish object relatives allows us to further explore the roles of additional morphological markers and primary cue timing in syntactic ambiguity resolution.

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. To this end, we expose native English speakers to an artificial language based on Portuguese phonotactics, manipulating case marker salience in terms of syllabicity, stress and sonority (high: /-'ka, -'ʃi/; low: /-l, -ɾ/). Participants are then grouped into two conditions where the marker has either high or low phonetic salience. This will provide further insights on the role of phonetic salience in the emergence of constructional knowledge and in the acquisition of non-native morphology, particularly,agent and patient markers. In sum, this project assesses the relative influence of factors that are known to separately facilitate the acquisition of constructions, contributing thus to our understanding of the factors that shape constructional entrenchment and to the discussion around the concept of construction itself.