The effects of cognates and syntactic preference on second-language production
Open Access
- Author:
- Massaro, Abigail Pearson
- Area of Honors:
- German
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Arts
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Carrie Neal Jackson, Thesis Supervisor
Samuel Mark Frederick, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- syntactic preference
cognates
shared syntax
second language acquisition - Abstract:
- Runnqvist, Gollan, Costa, and Ferreira (2013) report that second language (L2) speakers’ difficulty in producing L2 sentences—as measured by reaction times (RTs)—may be modulated by the frequency of a given syntactic alternative in both the L1 and the L2, suggesting that syntactic representations in both languages are co-activated during L2 production (e.g., Hartsuiker and Pickering, 2008). In cross-language syntactic priming, such syntactic-level co-activation may be further facilitated when target sentences contain L1-L2 cognates, namely words that are nearly identical in different languages, both in meaning as well as form (Bernolet, Hartsuiker, & Pickering, 2012). While such results parallel the cognate facilitation effect in L2 lexical processing (see van Hell & Tanner, 2012, for a review), further research is needed to determine whether such syntactic-level cognate facilitation extends to tasks conducted entirely in the L2. The present study uses the experimental paradigm from Runnqvist et al. (2013) to investigate the potential interaction between cognate status and the frequency of L1 versus L2 structural alternatives during L2 sentence production among German L2 speakers of English. Results reveal that participants are faster to produce L2-preferred structures, even when this preference differs from the preferred L1 structure, suggesting that German-English L2 speakers can acquire L2 structural preferences and are sensitive to structural frequency differences in their L2. No main effect was found for cognate status, however, indicating that cognates do not influence the production of syntactic structures and that syntactic planning does not (fully) implicate lexical retrieval.