NNLPP · Non-Native Language Processing and Production: Evidence for an Integrated Grammar

Non-Native Language Processing and Production: Evidence for an Integrated Grammar

Across today’s Europe, it is not surprising to see a family consisting of a Spanish father, an Irish mother and children speaking German natively in a restaurant, say, in the Netherlands. Parents move around for work, children change schools, and all of them acquire new languages every time they move. Despite a significant body of research on multilingualism, a few key questions have not been fully addressed yet: What psycholinguistic mechanisms ensure the successful addition of a new language to the existing mental grammar? How can people, both children and adults, understand complex sentences in a new language when their general proficiency in this language is quite low? The proposed project Non-Native Language Processing and Production: Evidence for an Integrated Grammar (NNLPP) addresses these questions from a novel perspective. NNLPP is an integrated study which compares the strategies multilingual speakers use across their languages. The project will investigate the role of syntactic structure in comprehension and production of unilingual sentences and sentences which switch from one language to another. A series of experiments will test 250-300 adult non-balanced multilinguals whose languages belong to different linguistic families: Norwegian, Russian, and English. Focusing on code-switched sentences, NNLPP will compare the participants’ reading times, eye movements and intonation patterns and provide a well-rounded description of psycholinguistic mechanisms used by a multilingual mind. The target sentences in NNLPP are code-switched at different places (1) manipulating the length of the code-switched fragment. I assume that code-switching in (1a) and (1b) forces a prosodic break at the places where the language change occurs, and that this prosodic break shapes sentence parsing and interpretation. (1a) Bill saw the friend of the neighbor [language change: English > Russian] that was talking about football in the yard. (1b) Bill saw the friend [language change: English > Russian] of the neighbor that was talking about football in the yard. (1c) Bill saw [language change: English > Russian] the friend of the neighbor that was talking about football in the yard. (1d). Bill saw the friend of the neighbor that was talking about football [language change: English > Russian] in the yard. The places of code-switching in (1a) and (1b) follow the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis (Fodor, 2002), and I anticipate (1a) to be interpreted as 'the friend was talking' and (1b) as 'the neighbor was talking'. If this assumption is confirmed in both Norwegian-English and Russian-Norwegian code-switching, it will mean that a certain prosodic structure forced by code-switching is a universal processing cue that informs mental structure building. The places of code-switching in the target sentences (1c) and (1d) manipulate the lengths of the code-switched fragment. In (1c) it keeps the bigger part of the sentence in one language, e.g., Russian, in (1d) in English. Typically, Russian speakers prefer to interpret sentences like in (1) as 'the friend was talking', and English speakers prefer the interpretation 'the neighbor was talking' (see Fodor, 2002, 1998 for full review). The preferred interpretations in (1 c, d) will show whether the sentence is parsed in a language-specific manner and follows the parsing preference of the language that supplies most of the lexical items. Thus, the participants are expected to prefer the interpretation 'the friend was talking' in (1c) and 'the neighbor was talking' in (1d). An alternative prediction is also available for sentences (1c) and (1d). The language of the matrix verb provides the matrix language for code-switching (Myers-Scotton & Jake, 2009). Both (1c) and (1d) begin with English and the matrix verb is given in English. Therefore, the participants may show a preference for the interpretation 'the neighbor was talking' in both (3c) and (3d). As the last alternative, the participants may choose an L1-like parse in all the experimental items in (3). NNLPP will use sentences like 1(a – d) in the processing experiments in language comprehension and production to test two hypotheses: 1. non-native sentence comprehension and production is an integrated process which follows universal parsing strategies (ex., prosodic cues) 2. in the absence of a universal parsing prompt, sentence comprehension and production are language-specific The results of NNLPP will offer a new perspective on mental grammars to researchers in the field of multilingualism and multilingual education, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, and human language processing. Besides, the NNLPP findings can be used in computer modelling by professionals in technology, computer scientists working in the field of natural language processing and artificial intelligence, and designers of language-learning platforms (ex., DuoLingo, Buzuu, ELT-online). The results will provide insights into cognitive processing necessary for professionals in language education: educators, speech pathologists, language policy makers, foreign language teachers and trainee teachers, general learners of foreign languages, parents, students of modern languages and linguistics at different universities. As a scholarly initiative, NNLPP supports the EU efforts to promote linguistic diversity, raise public awareness of multilingualism and inform language-related policies and linguistic education.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union