Conceptual and Grammatical Plurality of Conjoined NPs in L2 Sentence Comprehension/JASELE2016
Tamura, Y. (2016). Conceptual and grammatical plurality of conjoined NPs in L2 sentence comprehension. Paper presented at The 42nd Annual Conference of the Japan Society of English Language Education (JASELE 2016). Saitama, Japan.
Coordinate NPs = always plural? -> NO • It depends on the referent • Harry and only Harry is/*are going to be allowed to read this. • Pickles and ice cream is delicious. • Pickles and ice cream are delicious. (Morgan, 1984, p.72) Semantic properties matter! Number determination 6 Background
a cat and a dog in the yard. • There is a cat and a dog in the yard. • Native speakers of English tend to make the first conjunct agreement (Sobin, 1997) Number determination is a mixture of syntax, morphology, and semantics • In this study, I will use conceptual plurality to refer to the semantics of number. Number determination 7 Background
grammatical number sometimes differ • Scissors, tweezers, etc. • Conceptually singular but grammatically plural • Family, audience, etc. • Conceptually plural but grammatically singular • Conceptual number could override grammatical number (Humphreys & Bock, 2005; Vigliocco, Butterworth, & Garrett, 1996) • The two number marking processes are independent (Bock et al., 2004) • Marking and Morphing approach works for L1 sentence comprehension too(Wagers, Lau, & Phillips, 2009)
They know the rule but can’t use it in online (Jiang, 2004, 2007, Jiang et al., 2011) • What is easier for L2 learners? • Syntactically denoted plurality (Shibuya & Wakabayashi, 2008) • e.g., Tom and Mary • Lexically denoted plurality (e.g., Jiang et al., 2015) • e.g., these books, several bags, two cats, many apples Processing Plurality in SLA 11 Background
the lovers kissed the boy played… • (b) When the boy and the girl kissed the boy played… • No garden-path effects in (b) • L2 learners are capable of representing conjoined NPs as conceptually plural • Is syntactically denoted plurality easier? • Shibuya and Wakabayashi (2008) only investigated over the use of the third-person singular -s • e.g., Tom and Mary cook/*cooks… Conceptual Plurality in L2 Comprehension 12 Background
information during production (Foote, 2010) • Few studies investigated the role of conceptual number information during sentence comprehension (except Kusanagi, Tamura, Fukuta, 2015; Tamura et al., 2015) Problems 13 Background Shouldn’t we examine conceptual number processing in L2 sentence comprehension?
e.g., My mother and his father *is/are in New York City. • Two possibilities • Conceptual plurality ̋ & Grammatical plurality ̋ • Conceptual plurality ̋ & Grammatical plurality ☓ Hypothesis 14 Background Focus of the present study
those who participated in Tamura et al. (2015) Participants 16 The Present Study n M SD Min Max skew kurtosis Age 31 24.77 5.35 20 40 1.57 1.23 TOEIC 32 824.22 113.12 550 990 -0.61 -0.44 Study abroad (month) 18 11.36 13.28 0.5 54 1.89 3.28 Years of learning English 32 13.59 5.85 8 36 2.18 5.05 Starting age 31 11.03 4.66 2 25 1.02 2.47 Table 1. Demographic Information of the Participants
PP) • *The mother and his son is in the cottage now. • The mother and his son are in the cottage now. • 68 distractor items • One-third of the distractor items was followed by comprehension questions • Mean Accuracy of the comprehension questions • 82.8% (SD = 11.4) • Two counterbalanced lists • Two sessions with a few minutes break Materials 18 The Present Study
in each condition were calculated • Responses above the Mean RTs +/- 3SD were removed • Responses below 200ms were removed • Overall, 4.4% of all the responses were removed Analysis 19 The Present Study
Explanatory variables • Agreement condition (2 levels) • singular or plural •Covariate •The number of letters •Response variables •Raw RTs • Distribution family and link function • Inverse-Gaussian distribution and identity-link Analysis 20 The Present Study
By Items Parameters Estimate SE t p SD SD Intercept 617.34 37.55 16.44 <.001 91.73 43.11 c.letters 16.33 7.98 2.05 .04 — — Condition 7.30 19.93 0.37 .71 64.47 — My mother and his father is/are in New York City. Table 3. The Results of GLMM in Region 4
in New York City. Random effects Fixed effects By Subject By Items Parameters Estimate SE t p SD SD Intercept 496.45 35.85 13.85 <.001 63.30 31.94 c.letters -3.84 21.17 -0.18 .86 — — Condition -21.50 27.15 -0.79 .43 26.39 45.39 Table 4. The Results of GLMM in Region 5
in New York City. Random effects Fixed effects By Subject By Items Parameters Estimate SE t p SD SD Intercept 509.78 24.21 21.06 <.001 53.88 22.49 c.letters 25.88 7.08 3.66 <.001 — — Condition 26.06 18.75 1.39 .16 63.72 — Table 4. The Results of GLMM in Region 6
in New York City. Random effects Fixed effects By Subject By Items Parameters Estimate SE t p SD SD Intercept 500.70 24.41 20.51 <.001 60.61 31.34 c.letters 30.63 8.09 3.79 <.001 — — Condition 26.77 21.96 1.22 .22 77.49 — Table 5. The Results of GLMM in Region 7
conjoined NP (Tamura et al., 2015) • However, in this study • The same participants did not notice number agreement mismatches (A and B *is/are….) • They failed to utilize grammatical number Two Types of Plurality 33 Discussion
extract conceptual plurality from morphological plurality? • bananas -> • Can L2 learners of English extract conceptual plurality from morphological plurality if lexical support is provided? • these bananas -> Future Directions 36 Discussion
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