Frequency effects in language .... 1, Frequency effects in language learning and processing PDF
Preview Frequency effects in language .... 1, Frequency effects in language learning and processing
Frequency Effects in Language Learning and Processing Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs 244.1 Editor Volker Gast Founding Editor Werner Winter Editorial Board Walter Bisang Hans Henrich Hock Heiko Narrog Matthias Schlesewsky Niina Ning Zhang Editor responsible for this volume Matthias Schlesewsky De Gruyter Mouton Frequency Effects in Language Learning and Processing edited by Stefan Th. Gries Dagmar Divjak De Gruyter Mouton ISBN 978-3-11-027376-2 e-ISBN 978-3-11-027405-9 ISSN 1861-4302 LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData ACIPcatalogrecordforthisbookhasbeenappliedforattheLibraryofCongress. BibliographicinformationpublishedbytheDeutscheNationalbibliothek TheDeutscheNationalbibliothekliststhispublicationintheDeutscheNationalbibliografie; detailedbibliographicdataareavailableintheInternetathttp://dnb.dnb.de. ”2012WalterdeGruyterGmbH&Co.KG,Berlin/Boston Typesetting:RoyalStandard,HongKong Printing:Hubert&Co.GmbH&Co.KG,Göttingen (cid:2)(cid:2)Printedonacid-freepaper PrintedinGermany www.degruyter.com Table of contents Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Stefan Th. Gries What can we count in language, and what counts in language acquisition, cognition, and use?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Nick C. Ellis Are e¤ects of word frequency e¤ects of context of use? An analysis of initial fricative reduction in Spanish. . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 William D. Raymond and Esther L. Brown What statistics do learners track? Rules, constraints and schemas in (artificial) grammar learning. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 Vsevolod Kapatsinski Relative frequency e¤ects in Russian morphology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 Eugenia Antic´ Frequency, conservative gender systems, and the language-learning child: Changing systems of pronominal reference in Dutch . . . . . . . 109 Gunther De Vogelaer Frequency E¤ects and Transitional Probabilities in L1 and L2 Speakers’ Processing of Multiword Expressions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 Ping-Yu Huang, David Wible and Hwa-Wei Ko You talking to me? Corpus and experimental data on the zero auxiliary interrogative in British English. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 Andrew Caines The predictive value of word-level perplexity in human sentence processing: A case study on fixed adjective-preposition constructions in Dutch. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207 Maria Mos, Antal van den Bosch and Peter Berck Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241 Introduction Stefan Th. Gries The papers in this volume and its companion (Divjak & Gries 2012) were originally part of a theme session ‘Converging and diverging evidence: corpora and other (cognitive) phenomena?’ at the Corpus Linguistics 2009conferenceinLiverpoolaswellaspartofathemesession‘Frequency e¤ects in language’ planned for the International Cognitive Linguistics Conference at the University of California, Berkeley in 2009. We are very fortunate to have received a large number of very high-quality submis- sions to these events as well as to these two volumes and wish to thank our contributors for their contributions and their patience during the time thatwastakenupbyrevisionsandthepreparationofthefinalmanuscript. Usually, the purpose of an introduction to such an edited volume is to survey current trends in the relevant field(s), provide brief summaries of the papers included in the volume, and situate them with regard to what is currently happening in the field. The present introduction deviates from this tradition because one of the papers solicited for these two theme session was solicited as such an overview paper. Thus, in this volume, this overall introduction will res trict itself to brief characterizations of the paper and a few additional comments – the survey of the field and the identification of current trends and recent developments on the other hand can be found in Ellis’s state-of-the-art overview. Ellis discusses the interrelation of frequency and cognition – in cognition in general as well as in (second) language cognition – and, most importantly given current discussions in usage-based approaches to language, provides a detailed account of the factors that drive the kind of associative learning assumed by many in the field: type and token frequency, Zipfian distributions as well as recency, salience, perception, redundancy etc. Just as importantly, Ellis derives a variety of conclusions or implications of these factors for our modeling of learning and acquisition processes, which sets the stage for the papers in this volume. The other papers cover a very large range of approaches and methods. Most of them are on synchronic topics, but de Vogelaer focuses on fre- quency e¤ects in language change. Several studies are on native speakers’ linguistic behavior, but some involve data from non-adult native language speakers,secondlanguagelearners,andnativespeakers(ofEnglish)learn- 2 StefanTh.Gries inganartificiallanguage.Manystudiesinvolvecorpusdataintheformof various types of frequency data, but many also add experimental or other approachesasdiverseasacceptabilityjudgments,shadowing,questionnaires, eye-tracking, sentence-copying, computational modeling, and artificial language learning; most of them also involve sophisticated statistical analysisofvariouskinds(correlationsanddi¤erenttypesoflinearmodels, logisticregressions,linearmixed-e¤ectmodels,clusteranalyticaltechniques). The following summarizes the papers in this volume, which proceeds from phonological topics (Raymond & Brown and Kapatsinksi) via morphologi- cal studies (Antic´ and de Vogelaer) to syntactic/n-gram studies (Huang, Wible, & Ko as well as Caines and Mos, van den Bosch, & Berck). Raymond & Brown explore a range of frequency-related factors and their impact on initial fricative reduction in Spanish. They begin by point- ing out that results of previous studies have been inconclusive, in part because many di¤erent studies have included only partially overlapping predictors and controls; in addition, the exact causal nature of frequency e¤ects has also proven elusive. They then study data on [s]-initial Spanish wordsfromthefreeconversationsfromtheNewMexico-ColoradoSpanish Survey, a database of interviews and free conversations initiated in 1991. A large number of di¤erent frequency-related variables is coded for each instance of an s-word, including word frequency, bigram frequency, transi- tionalprobability(inbothdirections),andothers,andtheseareenteredinto a binary logistic regressiontotry to predict fricative reduction. The results show that s-redu ction is influenced by many predictors, too manytodiscusshereindetail.However,one veryinterestingconclusionis that, once a variety of contextual frequency measures is taken into con- sideration, then non-contextual measures did not contribute much to the regression model anymore, which is interesting since it forces us to re-evaluate our stance on frequency, from a pure repetition-based view to a more contextually-informed one, which in itself would constitute a huge conceptual development (cf. also below). Kapatsinski’s study involves a comparison of product-oriented vs. source-orientedgeneralizationsbymeansofanartificial-languagelearning experiment. Native speakers of English are exposed to small artificial lan- guages that feature a palatalization process but di¤er in terms of whether thesoundfavoringpalatalizationisalsofoundattachingtothesoundthat would be the result of the palatalization. The exposition to the artificial languages (with small interactive video-clips) favors either a source- oriented generalization or a product-oriented generalization. The results as obtained from cluster analyses of rating and production probabilities Introduction 3 provide strong support for product-oriented generalizations (esp. when sources and products are not close to each other). The paper by Antic´ studies the productivity of two Russian verb pre- fixes, po vs. voz/vos/vz/vs and the morphological decomposition. She first comparesthetwoprefixesintermsofavarietyofdesiderataofproductivity measures (e.g., intuitiveness and hapaxability). She then uses simple linear regressions for both prefixes and shows, on the basis of intercepts and slopes, that po is indeed the more productive a‰x. In a second case study, Antic´ reports on a prefix-separation experiment in which subjects’ reaction time is the critical dependent variable. On the basis of a linear mixed-e¤ects regression, she identifies a variety of parameters that significantly a¤ect subjects’ RTs, such as semantic trans- parency of the verbs, unprefixed family size, and the di¤erence between the frequency of the base verb and the frequency of the prefixed form. Three di¤erent theoretical accounts of the data are discussed, with the final analysis opting for a Bybee/Langacker type of network model of morphological representation. De Vogelaer studies the gender systems of Dutch dialects. More specif- ically, he starts out from the fact that Standard Dutch exhibits a gender mismatch of the binary article system and the ternary pronominal system and explores to what degree this historical change is a¤ected by frequency e¤ects. Results from a questionnaire study, in which subjects were put in a position to decide on the gender of nouns, indicate high- and low- frequency items behave di¤eren tly: the former are a¤ected in particular by standardization whereas the latter are influenced more by resemantici- zation. However, the study also cautions us that di¤erent types of data can yield very di¤erent results with regard to the e¤ect of frequency. De Vogelaercomparesfrequencydatafromthe9-million-wordSpokenDutch Corpus to age-of-acquisition data from a target vocabulary list. Correla- tion coe‰cients indicate that the process of standardization is more corre- lated with the adult spoken corpus frequencies whereas resemanticization is more correlated with the age-of-acquisition data. As De Vogelaer puts it,‘‘frequencye¤ectsaretypicallypoly-interpretable,’’andherightlyadvises readers to regularly explore di¤erent frequency measures and register- specific frequencies. The study by Huang, Wible, & Ko is concerned with transitional prob- abilities between words at the end of multi-word expressions, or n-grams, with the focus being on the contrast between frequent and entrenched cases such as on the other hand and less frequent and entrenched cases such as examined the hand. A first eye-tracking study tested whether L1 4 StefanTh.Gries and L2 speakers of English react di¤erently to these di¤erent degrees of predictability of hand. Results from ANOVAs on fixation probabilities, first-fixation durations, and gaze durations reveal that both speaker groups respond strongly to the di¤erence in predictability that results from the entrenched multi-word expressions. A follow-up case study explores these results in more detail by investi- gating some multi-word expression that had not exhibited a sensitivity towards transitional probabilities in the first experiment. L2-speakers were exposed to such expressions during a training phase (with two di¤erent types of exposure) and then tested with the same experimental design as before. The results show that frequent exposure during the training phase facilitated their processing, and more so than a less frequent but textually enhanced exposure to the stimuli. Both studies therefore show that the well-researched ability of speakers to detect/utilize transitional probabilities is also observed for L2 speakers and that basic assumptions of usage-based approaches as to how input frequency a¤ects processing are supported. Caines’s study is another one that combines corpus and experimental data.Hisfocusisthezero-auxiliaryinterrogativeinspokenBritishEnglish (e.g., you talkin’ to me?). His first case study is based on a multifactorial analysis of nearly ten thousand cases of progressive interrogatives in the spoken part of the BNC. Using a binary logistic regression, he identifies several predictors that significantly a¤ect the probability of zero-auxiliary forms, including, for example, the presence of a subject, second person, as well as the number of the verb . To shed more light on the construction’s characteristics, Caines also reports on two experiments, an acceptability judgment task (using magni- tude estimation) and a continuous shadowing task. An ANOVA of the acceptability judgment largely corroborates the corpus-based results, as do restoration and error rates in the shadowing tasks, providing a clear example of how methodological pluralism can shed light on di¤erent aspects of one and the same phenomenon. Mos, van den Bosch, & Berck’s study is also devoted to a multi-word expression, namely to what they call the Fixed Adjective Preposition (FAP) construction in Dutch, as exemplified by de boer is trots op zijn auto (‘the farmer is proud of his car’). They employ a rare and creative way to investigate how speakers partition sentences into parts: subjects are asked to copy a sentence, and the dependent variable is the points at which subjects revisit the sentence they are copying, the assumption being that this will fall between constituents more often than interrupt them. In this case, the subjects – 6th graders – were asked to copy fairly frequent
The list of books you might like
