Language Retention and Improvement After a Study Abroad Experience

264 Pages·2012·1.18 MB·English

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

Language Retention and Improvement after a Study Abroad Experience

A DISSERTATION

SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS

for the degree

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Field of Linguistics

By

Caroline Engstler

EVANSTON, ILLINOIS

June 2012
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© Copyright by Caroline Engstler 2012
All Rights Reserved
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ABSTRACT
Language Retention and Improvement after a Study Abroad Experience
Caroline Engstler
This dissertation examines the linguistic and extralinguistic factors that influence changes
in performance in second language speech perception and speech production experienced by
study-abroad returnees in the first nine months after the end of the study-abroad program.
English-French bilinguals who had recently returned from a four-month study abroad
program in France participated in two speech perception and two speech production experiments
at three points in time after their return home from the study-abroad stay (two, five, and nine
months after their return). Two groups of native French speakers and native English speakers
served as controls. A number of linguistic and extralinguistic factors were investigated with
regards to their influence on performance changes across time.
The experiments revealed that bilinguals not only did not show signs of language
attrition, but rather they retained their skills for all tasks across the first five to nine months after
their return from France, and for some tasks (AX discrimination, lexical decision, picture
naming) they even improved their performance across time. This was true for bilinguals who
were still taking French classes, and even for those that were not taking classes and reported low
overall exposure to French. In addition, it was shown that initial proficiency did not affect the
amount of improvement across time, while amount of exposure made a difference in the
phonological perceptual task (AX discrimination). Furthermore, highly motivated bilinguals with
a positive attitude towards the French culture were shown to improve more across time than less
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motivated bilinguals. Finally, high executive functioning was shown to lead to bigger
improvements across time.
These results are important at a theoretical level, since they provide the possibility to
extend second language speech acquisition models and can inform a multi-componential model
of language attrition, which includes linguistic as well as extralinguistic factors for language
changes across time. Furthermore, the results have practical implications, in that they can help
language instructors and students identify which linguistic and behavioral factors to focus on in
the language learning environment to aid in the long-term retention of second language skills.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to the many people who have helped me throughout the various stages of
preparing and writing this dissertation.
First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor, Matt Goldrick, for the amount of
time and energy he has put into guiding me through this project, for providing the fastest and
most thorough feedback imaginable, and for showing me how to stay positive through a
seemingly never-ending task.
Further thanks go to my two other committee members, Ann Bradlow and Ken Paller, for
their helpful feedback on earlier versions of this dissertation as well as for challenging me to
think more deeply about the questions this research has addressed. Special thanks also go to my
‘honorary’ committee member, Margaret Sinclair, who has helped me with the development of
the French stimuli and made sure that all things French in this dissertation are indeed correct.
I also thank the faculty and staff of the Department of Linguistics as well as my fellow
graduate students for their intellectual and social support. I have been privileged to receive
financial support for this project from the Department of Linguistics, a Northwestern University
Graduate Research Grant, as well as NSF grant BCS-0846147 to Matt Goldrick.
Thank you to the participants in this study for sitting through hours of not always exciting
linguistics experiments and for sharing their stories from their time abroad with me along the
way. Thanks also to Lucie Gauthier and Melissa Baese-Berk for recording the French and
English stimuli respectively, and to Sarah Gregory, Kelly Kahle, and especially Sean Arn for
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helping me with subject running and the tedious task of doing acoustic measurements. Many
thanks go to Stewart Callner for proofreading all 260+ pages of this dissertation.
Thanks so much to my friends and family in Austria, the U.S., and the rest of the world
for their support and encouragement. And finally, I am eternally grateful to Jeremy, who has put
his own life on hold for the past few months for doing everything from teaching me how to code
in Python and R (and troubleshooting everything I coded wrong) to running the household and
being a full-time dad. You don’t know how thankful I am to have you in my life, and now that
it’s your turn, please let me make up for it.
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To Jeremy and Julius
– My favorite bilinguals
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Table of Contents
ABSTRACT ...............................................................................................................................3
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.........................................................................................................5
List of tables ............................................................................................................................. 16
List of figures ............................................................................................................................ 17
Chapter 1: Introduction and literature review ............................................................................ 21
1.1 Introduction ................................................................................................................ 21
1.2 Previous research on phonological and lexical L2 attrition, retention, and improvement
…………… .......................................................................................................................... 23
1.2.1 Phonological attrition, retention, and improvement .............................................. 23
1.2.2 Lexical attrition, retention, and improvement ....................................................... 28
1.3 Theoretical frameworks for language attrition, retention and improvement: Models for
second language speech acquisition ....................................................................................... 32
1.3.1 The Speech Learning Model (SLM) ..................................................................... 33
1.3.2 The Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM) .......................................................... 34
1.3.3 The Native Language Magnet Theory (NLM) ...................................................... 38
1.4 Sound status as a factor in language retention .............................................................. 39
1.4.1 Differences between French and English consonants and vowels ......................... 41
1.4.2 Perception of French sounds by native English speakers ...................................... 42
Consonant perception ........................................................................................................ 42
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Vowel perception ............................................................................................................... 44
1.4.3 Production of French sounds by native English speakers ...................................... 45
Consonant production ....................................................................................................... 45
Consonant and vowel production ....................................................................................... 48
1.5 Lexical status as a factor in language retention ............................................................ 49
1.5.1 Language production............................................................................................ 50
1.5.2 Language comprehension ..................................................................................... 51
1.5.3 Language comprehension and production............................................................. 53
1.5.4 Training studies ................................................................................................... 54
Chapter 2: The current study .................................................................................................... 57
2.1 Overall design of the study .......................................................................................... 57
Participants ....................................................................................................................... 57
Procedure.......................................................................................................................... 58
Chapter 3: Retention of L2 speech perception .......................................................................... 62
3.1 Introduction ................................................................................................................ 62
3.2 Experiment 1: Retention of phonological skills ........................................................... 63
3.2.1 Introduction ......................................................................................................... 63
3.2.2 Methods ............................................................................................................... 64
Participants ....................................................................................................................... 64
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Materials ........................................................................................................................... 64
Procedure.......................................................................................................................... 65
Coding .............................................................................................................................. 67
Analysis ............................................................................................................................. 68
3.2.3 Results ................................................................................................................. 70
Baseline performance at Time 0 ........................................................................................ 70
Changes across the first five months (Time 0 versus Time 1) ............................................. 73
a) Practice Effects: Bilinguals versus English native speakers ........................................... 74
b) Effect of Continued French study: Bilinguals who continued studying French versus
bilinguals who did not ....................................................................................................... 78
Changes across the first nine months (Time 0 versus Time 2) ............................................ 80
3.2.4 Discussion ........................................................................................................... 83
3.2.5 Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 93
3.3 Experiment 2: Retention of lexical skills ..................................................................... 95
3.3.1 Introduction ......................................................................................................... 95
3.3.2 Methods ............................................................................................................... 95
Participants ....................................................................................................................... 95
Materials ........................................................................................................................... 96
Procedure.......................................................................................................................... 97