Dutch Learners Research Articles

Correction to: The development of abstract syntactic representations in beginning L2 learners of Dutch

Correction to: The development of abstract syntactic representations in beginning L2 learners of Dutch

Language Dependency of /s/ Production: Native Dutch Versus Non-Native English.

With forensic recordings being collected in multiple languages increasingly often, this study investigates the language dependency of the voiceless alveolar fricative /s/ in speakers of native (L1) Dutch and non-native (L2) English. Due to phonetic similarity between the languages, Dutch learners of English may exhibit language-independent /s/ acoustics, making it an interesting feature for multilingual forensic speaker comparisons (FSCs). However, the findings show that out of the four spectral moments, center of gravity, standard deviation (SD), skewness, and kurtosis, only SD remained stable across the languages; the other measurements were language-dependent. The results were largely independent of the /s/ tokens' contexts, although an interaction between language and context was found for skewness and kurtosis: With a labial right phonetic neighbor, language dependency was largely reduced. The findings have implications for FSCs: as /s/ is language-dependent in speakers of L1 Dutch and L2 English, it shows limited potential for cross-linguistic speaker comparisons in forensic casework.

Dutch compound constructions in additional language acquisition

Abstract Studies have demonstrated that Dutch has a much stronger tendency towards compounding than French (e.g., Du. badkamer vs Fr. salle de bains ‘bathroom’) when adopting a restrictive approach of compounding in which the presence of prepositions and/or internal inflection in multi-word expressions is considered evidence for their syntactic formation. The example above illustrates that Dutch compounding differs from French in another important aspect: while Germanic compounding is by definition right-headed, French has a general tendency towards left-hand headed compounds and phrases. In this study, we investigate the impact of these typological differences on the acquisition of Dutch nominal compounds by French-speaking learners in the context of multilingual Belgium. We provide an in-depth corpus analysis of the acquisition of Dutch compounds at different levels of abstraction (schematic and substantive compound constructions). Moreover, we investigate the impact of additional target-language input through CLIL programs (Content and Language Integrated Learning) on the acquisition of Dutch compounds by French-speaking learners of Dutch. The results are described and interpreted from the perspective of Diasystematic Construction Grammar (DCxG), which conceptualizes the linguistic competence of multilingual speakers as one integrated network of constructions, containing language-specific idioconstructions and shared diaconstructions.

Intensification strength in speech: language-specific preferences and differences between native and learner language

In this article we analyse the use of intensification in the spoken productions of French-speaking learners of Dutch and English. We compare the strength of intensifiers used by learners in their first language (L1) and in their additional language (AL), and contrast these results with data from control groups of L1 speakers. Our corpus results indicate that L1 English speakers tend to intensify more frequently but opt for weaker intensifiers, while L1 French speakers intensify less frequently but use stronger intensifiers. L1 Dutch speakers take the middle position in both aspects. The analysis of the learner corpora reveals overall more similarities between AL English and L1 English than between AL Dutch and L1 Dutch, confirming the trends observed in previous studies on the same learners (Hendrikx, 2019).

Lexical Stress Identification in Cochlear Implant-Simulated Speech by Non-Native Listeners.

This study investigates whether a presumed difference in the perceptibility of cues to lexical stress in spectro-temporally degraded simulated cochlear implant (CI) speech affects how listeners weight these cues during a lexical stress identification task, specifically in their non-native language. Previous research suggests that in English, listeners predominantly rely on a reduction in vowel quality as a cue to lexical stress. In Dutch, changes in the fundamental frequency (F0) contour seem to have a greater functional weight than the vowel quality contrast. Generally, non-native listeners use the cue-weighting strategies from their native language in the non-native language. Moreover, few studies have suggested that these cues to lexical stress are differently perceptible in spectro-temporally degraded electric hearing, as CI users appear to make more effective use of changes in vowel quality than of changes in the F0 contour as cues to linguistic phenomena. In this study, native Dutch learners of English identified stressed syllables in CI-simulated and non-CI-simulated Dutch and English words that contained changes in the F0 contour and vowel quality as cues to lexical stress. The results indicate that neither the cue-weighting strategies in the native language nor in the non-native language are influenced by the perceptibility of cues in the spectro-temporally degraded speech signal. These results are in contrast to our expectations based on previous research and support the idea that cue weighting is a flexible and transferable process.

A Contrastive Perspective on English and Dutch Front Monophthongs

This paper explores the front pure vowels of English and Dutch from a contrastive standpoint. It basically aims to quantitatively discover the degree to which English and Dutch front monophthong systems are different from each other and proceeds to make some early yet data-driven predictions about the comparative levels of difficulty that the English-speaking learners of Dutch and the Dutch-speaking learners of English as a foreign language would experience while learning their target languages. Applying the same method designed for a quantitative-contrastive phonemic analysis in the earlier works of 2015 and 2019, the researchers prove that the front monophthong systems of English and Dutch are considerably different (81.82%) from each other and that the acquisition workload is heavier (83.33:80) for English speaking learners of Dutch as a foreign language than it is for Dutch speaking learners of English. In contrast, learners of English will need to generate a greater degree (83.33:80) of substratum counter-influence than learners of Dutch in order to achieve an acceptable level of accuracy in the articulation of their target phonemes. Although both groups of learners retain one vowel sound that occurs as phonetically identical phoneme (16.67:20), the final indication is that the English front monophthong system is likely to pose a greater challenge for its learners. Spectrum, Volume 17, June 2022: 31-46

The development of abstract syntactic representations in beginning L2 learners of Dutch

The development of abstract syntactic representations in beginning L2 learners of Dutch

Language-specific principles of discourse conceptualization in L2 English

Abstract In a previous series of crosslinguistic empirical studies in the domain of narratives and picture descriptions, it has been shown that different conceptual principles of discourse structure are built by L1 users based on routine cognitive processes. These in turn seem to be induced by the underlying language-specific properties of the L1s. Native speakers of Dutch and German, for example, tend to conceptualize and structure the progression of the narrative or description through linking devices in utterance-initial position, primarily through the use of the protagonist or temporal/locative adverbials. In contrast, native English speakers tend to prefer linking with the (syntactic) subject in initial position. The present study shows how complex it is for very advanced Dutch learners of L2 English to unravel these non-superficial underlying conceptual discourse structures in their L2. The question is whether they can overcome the routinized cognitive schemata of language processing that go with their habitual L1 strategies of telling a story or describing a picture. This paper shows how even very advanced Dutch learners can only partially learn the narrative or descriptive strategies of native English speakers.

The processing of gender agreement during reading comprehension in L2 French: The effects of syntactic complexity and working memory

A longstanding debate in L2 research focuses on how syntactic complexity needs to be operationalized to account for L2 performances. Whereas many studies investigated this issue in L2 production, very few studies focused on L2 sentence processing. The present study aimed at investigating the effect of syntactic complexity on gender agreement processing in L2 French, while controlling for the learners’ working memory capacity. We tested 37 Dutch learners of French by means of a self-paced reading technique. The results showed decreased sensitivity to gender agreement in embedded structures, but increased sensitivity to gender agreement in non-embedded structures. We concluded that the number of clauses in gender agreement constructions accounts for the effect of syntactic complexity on gender agreement processing in L2 French and that this measure is negatively correlated to sensitivity to gender agreement. We furthermore concluded that (non-verbal) working memory does not affect L2 gender agreement processing.

Prosodic Focus Interpretation in Spectrotemporally Degraded Speech by Non-Native Listeners.

This study assesses how spectrotemporal degradations that can occur in the sound transmission of a cochlear implant (CI) may influence the ability of non-native listeners to recognize the intended meaning of utterances based on the position of the prosodically focused word. Previous research suggests that perceptual accuracy and listening effort are negatively affected by CI processing (or CI simulations) or when the speech is presented in a non-native language, in a number of tasks and circumstances. How these two factors interact to affect prosodic focus interpretation, however, remains unclear. In an online experiment, normal-hearing (NH) adolescent and adult native Dutch learners of English and a small control group of NH native English adolescents listened to CI-simulated (eight-channel noise-band vocoded) and non-CI-simulated English sentences differing in prosodically marked focus. For assessing perceptual accuracy, listeners had to indicate which of four possible context questions the speaker answered. For assessing listening effort, a dual-task paradigm was used with a secondary free recall task. The results indicated that prosodic focus interpretation was significantly less accurate in the CI-simulated condition compared with the non-CI-simulated condition but that listening effort was not increased. Moreover, there was no interaction between the influence of the degraded CI-simulated speech signal and listening groups in either their perceptual accuracy or listening effort. Non-native listeners are not more strongly affected by spectrotemporal degradations than native listeners, and less proficient non-native listeners are not more strongly affected by these degradations than more proficient non-native listeners.

Strategies of clausal postmodification in learner English

AbstractThe difficulty of automatically extracting syntactic structures from authentic learner data has previously limited the kinds of questions addressed by meansof Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis(CIA;Granger, 2015), or has forced researchers to resort to manual analysis of smaller corpora. This study responds to the call for greater use of parsed corpora by using automated parsing and refined corpus analysis software to investigate advanced EFL learners’ use of relative and participial clauses for nominal postmodification. The use of clausal postmodifiers inside the noun phrase may be seen as a marker of proficiency and syntactic maturity in academic writing, but the proportional use of relative and participial clauses for nominal postmodification may also be subject to L1 transfer. To investigate the role of transfer and syntactic maturity in the use of nominal postmodification, we compare texts written by Dutch EFL learners with those produced by learners from typologically distinct L1s, i.e. Czech and French, and by native speakers of English. Use of participial clauses and relative clauses in Dutch learners’ EFL texts is then compared with their use in L1 Dutch. The high degree of L1-interlanguage congruity suggests that transfer plays an important role in the Dutch learners’ strong preference for relative clauses for nominal postmodification. Based on the comparison with both other learner groups, we hypothesize that such transfer effects in the use of clausal postmodification can only emerge once the learner has reached a sufficient level of syntactic maturity in the target language.

Authentic video materials as a means of shaping communicative competence in Russian among Spanish and Dutch learners

Teaching Russian as a foreign language (RFL) without immersion into a natural language environment presents a particular challenge and requires modern methods to deve-lop basic communicative and linguistic competencies of the students. While teaching listening at the first stage of learning a foreign language, an active use of authentic materials plays an important role as one of the major requirements of the communicative approach. The relevance of the present topic consists in the need of developing listening skills at the early stage of studying RFL and optimizing the work of students as independent learners. The aim of the study was to develop a set of video exercises for A0 level, aimed at improving the communicative competence of students, their knowledge of cultural norms and speech etiquette. To achieve this aim,a set of methodological methods has been used: a task modeling method, a comparative method and observation. The complete set of exercises was tested in groups of students aged 20-45, learning Russian as a foreign language at beginner’s level at two language centers, in Spain and in the Netherlands. Exercises with video fragments were divided into six units and were designed to practice the use of some grammar forms and lexical units (verbs belonging to the first and second conjugation type, prepositions в/на (in, on), accusative and prepositional cases).For independent work, students were asked to complete the preparatory and main stages of each unit. The final stage, as a control stage, was carried out in the classroom with a teacher to activate the structures heard in listening, analyze and discuss the video material. The results ofthe study show that the use of authentic materials improves listening, brings the educational process as close as possible to the situation of real live communication, motivates students and helps them to master the new grammatical and lexical units. There were no significant differences observed in the results of the final task on listening in Spanish and Dutch groups. The errors have to do with an increased speed of utterance, voice overlapping, children's speech, that will be taken into account for the further development of listening exercises for A0 level students and publishing a full set of exercises for RFL learners and teachers.

Structural priming and cross-linguistic influence in L2 comprehension of Dutch relative clauses and PP-attachments: Differences between German and English learners of Dutch

Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research Questions: This study investigated cross-linguistic influence and structural priming in L2 learners’ comprehension of Dutch relative clauses (RCs) and PP-attachments. While PP-attachments are structurally ambiguous in all three languages, RCs are structurally ambiguous in Dutch and German, but not in English. Design/Methodology/Approach: L1 speakers of German ( n = 18) and English ( n = 19) completed a structural priming task in their L2 Dutch with a pre-test, a priming phase, an immediate post-test, and a delayed post-test 1 day later. Data and Analysis: The data were analysed using t tests and repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA). In the pre-test, L1 speakers of German showed a clear parsing preference for subject RCs and a slight preference for VP-attachment, whereas L1 speakers of English showed a clear parsing preference for object RCs and a slight preference for NP-attachment. The English L1 speakers were sensitive to structural priming, but only when primed with subject RCs and VP-attachments. This priming was still visible 1 day later. The German L1 speakers were not sensitive to the priming manipulation. Findings/Conclusion: The pre-test showed that L1 parsing preferences influence L2 processing; the structural priming effects in the English L1 speakers showed an inverse frequency effect that is based on experiences from both L1 and L2; the delayed post-test showed that structural priming can be seen as a form of implicit learning. Originality: This is the first structural priming study that compared two groups of L2 speakers on two different structures. Significance/Implications: Structural priming can be seen as a form of implicit learning in which experienced frequencies from both L1 and L2 give rise to a developing shared syntax.

Automatic Speech Recognition and Pronunciation Error Detection of Dutch Non-native Speech: cumulating speech resources in a pluricentric language

• Improving the performance of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) on learner's speech in a non-dominant variety of a pluricentric language by cumulating speech resources from different varieties of the same language. • Through the transfer learning approach, the knowledge from a dominant variety can be transferred to non-dominant variety and this benefits non-native speech recognition. • Introducing plausible pronunciation errors in a native corpus of the non-dominant variety based on knowledge from the dominant variety to evaluate the performance of Pronunciation Error Detection (PED) algorithms. The shortage of large-scale learners’ speech corpora and precise manual annotations are two major challenges for automatic L2 speech recognition and error detection in L2 speech, especially for non-dominant varieties of pluricentric languages. In these cases, collecting and annotating large non-native (L2 learner) corpora for all language varieties is often unattainable. In this study, we investigated ways of addressing these problems through conventional and transfer learning Deep Neural Network (DNN) based Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and ASR-based pronunciation error detection (PED) by cumulating Netherlandic Dutch and Flemish Dutch speech resources. First, we show that for ASR the baseline system can be improved by combining the Netherlandic Dutch and Flemish Dutch datasets. Next, through the knowledge learned from models trained on the Netherlandic Dutch data, the Flemish Dutch learners' ASR model can be further improved. In order to evaluate the performance of the PED algorithms in the absence of learner speech data with pronunciation error annotations, we introduced plausible pronunciation errors in the native corpora based on knowledge from Flemish learner speech, in order to simulate non-native speech errors. For PED we found that the results are much better for a GOP classifier trained on Flemish Dutch data than for one trained on Netherlandic Dutch data. PED produced worse results when the Netherlandic Dutch data were merged with the Flemish Dutch data, while for ASR, lower WERs were attained. Whether adding Netherlandic Dutch data to Flemish Dutch data is beneficial, thus seems to depend on the specific task the data are used for. We discuss these results, compare them to those of related research and suggest avenues for future research.

Vocabulary learning at first exposure: Replication of Gullberg et al. (2012) and Shoemaker and Rast (2013)

AbstractThis article puts forward several proposals for replicating two well-known First Exposure studies dealing with the earliest stages of adult second language acquisition. Both of them enquire into the word-level knowledge that complete beginners are able to extract from minimal input when exposed to a new language for the first time. They also focus on several input variables that may enhance learning from minimal input. However, the first, by Gullberg et al. (2012), uses audiovisual input in Dutch learners of Chinese to assess word recognition and word meaning after watching a short video; while the second, by Shoemaker and Rast (2013), uses oral input with French learners of Polish to measure word recognition before and after 6.5 hours of intensive classroom exposure. Close and approximate replications of these studies can help to re-evaluate and generalise the findings, as well as contributing additional relevant data to the field.

Processing mismatching gendered possessive pronouns in L1 Dutch and L2 French

The results of a self-paced reading experiment show that reading times in Dutch increase when there is a gender mismatch between the subject and a subsequent possessive pronoun, signaling an increase in processing difficulty. We hypothesized that Dutch learners of French incorrectly apply the rules of their L1 in their L2 and should therefore also show an increase in reading times in French upon encountering a possessive pronoun for which grammatical gender differs from the biological gender of the subject (the possessor). At the same time, we expected that they would have no or less difficulties in processing ungrammatical French sentences in which the biological gender of the subject/possessor matches the gender of the possessive pronoun. We did not find either of these effects in a second self-paced reading experiment. We assume that the Dutch learners of French parse the foreign language sentences in a shallow fashion.

The influence of first and second language on the acquisition of pragmatic markers in Spanish

This paper reports on an experimental study of the use of two Spanish markers of epistemic modality and evidentiality, creo que ‘I believe that’ and pienso que ‘I think that’, by native speakers, and by Dutch and German learners of Spanish. We found a clear preference for creo que among the native speakers of Spanish, but with differences between the main varieties of the language. For Dutch and German learners the preference for creo que was significantly weaker, and for beginning learners of Spanish it was significantly weaker than for advanced learners. While for the Dutch learners of Spanish this pattern reflects the preference for I think over I believe in their L1, the preference that the German-speaking learners have for creo que can be seen as evidence for a general tendency noticed in the literature, namely the interference of an L2 (in this case English) instead of the L1 (in this case German) in L3 performance (in this case Spanish).

Perception of Different Tone Contrasts at Sub-Lexical and Lexical Levels by Dutch Learners of Mandarin Chinese.

This study explores the difficulties in distinguishing different lexical tone contrasts at both sub-lexical and lexical levels for beginning and advanced Dutch learners of Mandarin, using a sequence-recall task and an auditory lexical decision task. In both tasks, the Tone 2-Tone 3 contrast is most prone to errors for both groups of learners. A significant improvement in the advanced group was found for this tone contrast in the sub-lexical sequence recall task, but not in the lexical decision task. This is taken as evidence that utilizing tones in on-line spoken word recognition is more complex and demanding for L2 learners than in a memory-based task. The results of the lexical decision task also revealed that advanced learners have developed a stronger sensitivity to Tone 1 compared to the other three tones, with Tone 4 showing the least sensitivity. These findings suggest different levels of robustness and distinctiveness for the representation of different lexical tones in L2 learners’ lexicon and consequently different levels of proficiency in integrating tones for lexical processing. The observed patterns of difficulty are potentially related to the acoustic characteristics of different lexical tone contrasts as well as to the interference of the suprasegmental features of learner’s native language (i.e., the tonal contrasts of Dutch intonation) on the acquisition of the Mandarin lexical tone contrasts.

A laboratory study of naturalistic second language learning: Acquiring grammatical gender from simple dialogue.

The aim of this study was twofold: first, to develop an experimental technique as a tool to investigate learning outcomes of spontaneous, naturalistic second language (L2) learning under controlled laboratory conditions; and second, to explore how this technique can be used to understand the basic conditions and limits of this learning. Two variants of a dialogue game were tested in which corrective L2 input was provided to the learners, but the learning aspect was camouflaged. Participants were German learners of Dutch who are known to display persistent grammatical gender errors in Dutch owing to incorrect first language (L1)-L2 transfer. In Experiment 1, the participant and a 'virtual partner' (audio-recordings) took turns in describing cards using gender-marked article-noun phrases. However, the majority of the participants became aware of learning articles as goal of the experiment, either because of the way we asked participants about the goal of the experiment or because of the task used. Therefore, we changed both aspects and used a dialogue-memory game in Experiment 2, which indeed led only a minority (28%) to suspect the real goal of the study. In both experiments, participants showed substantial learning of word gender (on average 13.8 percentage points increase in accuracy) after only one instance of correct input. A manipulation of the number of trials (lag) between correct input and production did not affect results. Furthermore, the 72% of 'naïve' participants in Experiment 2 showed as much learning as the full sample. Thus, the new paradigm offers important insights into the determinants of naturalistic learning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Perception of Different Tone Contrasts at Sub-Lexical and Lexical Levels by Dutch Learners of Mandarin Chinese

Perception of Different Tone Contrasts at Sub-Lexical and Lexical Levels by Dutch Learners of Mandarin Chinese