This article presented several very interesting ideas. One was that for language learners, comprehension usually precedes production. I personally have found this to be true because I notice that in my L2 when a native speaker is speaking to me I understand what they are saying, but to hold a fast paced conversation I sometimes have to rely on responding in a mix of the L2 and L1 or just the L1 because I can’t produce sentences back fast enough just in the L2.
Another thing I liked about the article is that it brings ERP into the picture. While traditionally we’ve often seen a lot of grammaticality judgements or sentence interpretation tasks in linguistics, this article explains why ERPs are a better way of judging linguistic competence, because: “The use of event-related potentials (ERPs) meets all of these criteria; that is, they reveal online processing, differentially reflect lexical and syntactic processing, and are sensitive to developmental changes.”
It was also nice to see all these studies with transfer, which we’ve already discussed a lot in class and see the results of these ERP studies. To me it looked like there is a lot of evidence for transfer because people who’s L1 had more similar aspects to the L2 they were learning were often able to have more similar results to a native speaker of the L2 earlier than someone who’s L1 is a lot different.
I also agree with the idea that comprehension precedes production when we learn languages. Maybe many people have experienced the frustration that they cannot speak/response fluently even though they can understand what they are said. Since ERP was new knowledge to me in the last class, it was interesting that our EEG react to linguistic errors. Seeing the actual figures of ERPs helps us a lot when we think about language competence.
I thought it was interesting that participants had much stronger neurological response to more marked linguistic forms. For example, French L2 learners showed little response to violations of the unpronounced singular/plural article distinction, but displayed a great response to pronounced agreement on French verbs after just a few weeks. I also thought it was interesting that language similarity seems to affect morphosyntax grammaticalization more than phonological. The Finnish vowel harmony study found native-like responses to violations in vowel harmony. I found this surprising because other studies have shown people need to acquire a language’s phonology before the age of six in order to have native production levels. These studies may highlight the difference between linguistic competence and production.
I agree that this article addresses pertinent points about transfer. L2 learners internalize different “rules” at different paces depending on the similarity of the rules to those of their L1. For example, L1 English learners of French showed little neural response to article/noun gender agreement errors (a grammatical rule that does not exist in English), yet they showed a heightened sensitivity to subject/verb agreement errors (the rule in French being similar to that in English).
The article goes on to discuss the role that phonological cues play in identifying grammatical errors, especially in regards to an L2 learner’s processing of morphemes by way of responding to “pseudo words”. It seems that phonological cues, however, play less of a role in morphosyntactic agreement, which may be influenced more by L1 and L2 similarity.
I thought the article’s final comments about stages of language development were interesting, especially for teachers, noting that learners progress through “discrete stages of learning” in which memorization precedes the learning of rules.
It was suggested, however, that perhaps “learners are memorizing probabilistic dependencies between nonadjacent morphemes” rather than simply memorizing words/sequences of words. Instead they memorize the patterns of related words and their morphemes (for example, in subject/verb agreement: “Ils” in French is often associated with a verb ending in “-ent”). L2 learners learn these dependencies first, only later progressing to comprehension of the rules that dictate the dependencies.
With regard to the grammaticalization of the learners’ L2, it seems that the distance between each speakers L1 and L2 is inversely correlated to the intensity of the P600. The authors account for intersubject variability and did not examine in detail grammatical proximity of speakers’ L1 and L2 but despite this they were able to draw important conclusions relating to the brain responses to grammatical rules during the first year of language instruction. The variability and apparent discontinuity of grammatical internalization during this phase could be attributed to the creation of an interlanguage in the brain that gradually transitions from N400 to P600 signals as the learner becomes more familiar with the grammatical rules of the L2. The inductive learning mechanisms that the authors refer to concerning the acquisition of L2 grammar rules could also be construed as evidence for Universal Grammar, since there seems to be an incomplete “transfer of L1 grammatical processing resources”.
The two aspects the study shows; similar agreement rules in L1&L2 are grammaticalized relatively quickly, ERP response to gender concord violation was a good example on that. And I agree with the argument that some grammatical aspects allow speakers to transfer their native language knowledge to their L2. The second aspect is that the influence of L1, the level of linguistic structure and phonological information provide a clearer understanding of how and when learners acquire aspects of L2. And the important point is that the brain response to violation of L2 rules consistently changes, in other words; learners progress through discontinuous stages from the first year of instruction. In the first stages, there is no complete transfer of L1 grammatical processing when acquiring L2.
It was interesting to see through the ERP response experiments, the correlation between grammaticalization and L2 learning over time. This emphasizes the theory that L2 aquisition differs depending on the similarities between the L1 and the L2. The “grammaticalization” refers also to the discussions we have recently had in class about the phonological differences of languages, and one’s ability to transfer that L1 knowledge to the L2.
In the article, the authors mention an experiment which tested Native French speakers and German learners of French. Their results showed that phonological cues play an important role in the learning and processing of grammatical morphemes. (p136) The P600 response was especially large in errors which were phonologically apparent, while silent errors were for the most part dismissed.
This article helped me to understand the ways in which the P600 and N400 responses can help linguists understand someone’s comprehension of the language they are learning.
I was particularly intrigued by the idea that for L1 learners, comprehension will precede production. I have noticed this both as a teacher and a learner of a second language. It can be frustrating to understand everything that is being said in a conversation, yet not be able to participate because you either do not have the vocabulary necessary to respond, or do not have the ability to hold a grammatical, intelligible conversation.
I also found to reference to L2 ERP responses to gender concord violations to be interesting; because nouns in English have no gender, it is to be expected that L1 English speakers learning German would have problems learning noun gender. However, I noticed this semester that the two L1 Spanish speakers in my classroom who are learning German have a much easier time learning the gender for nouns. They only seem to encounter problems when the gender of the noun in German is different than the gender of the noun in Spanish (ex. moon is feminine in Spanish, but masculine in German). They tend to revert back to the Spanish gender when using the object in conversation and will occasionally frown or look confused when I refer to the noun by a new gender.
The cross sectional experiment conducted on learners of German also intrigued me. The author notes that experiment was conducted on different levels of German learners using only regular verbs with no stem vowel changes. I found myself if the results would have been different if the experiment had included stem vowel changing verbs. In my experience, I have found that students often forget about the vowel change, and conjugate the verb with the verb’s regular vowel in place. Because of this, I wonder if the results would have shown no P600 effect in the L2 German learners.
Concrete evidence of an interlanguage by way of a biphasic N400/P600 response is nice to have, since beforehand it seemed like an abstract thing that MAYBE existed.
I’d be curious to see a longitudinal study where students’ study habits were also tracked so as to see whether people who studied hard shifted from N400 to P600 faster than those who did not.
It is very interesting to see that this study proved that transfer does exist. Especially the fact that study shows consistent change in learners’ brain responses when they make grammatical mistakes during the first year of instruction really strikes me.
I found the evidence of transfer interesting, although the evidence seemed to support what is already believed for the most part, that grammatical rules present in L1 are more easily and quickly learned in an L2 and that those not present are still possible to learn but it takes more time. I was surprised to see the quick acquisition of the Finnish vowel agreement rules by English L1 learners, as this was the only finding that seemed to stray from what we know of transfer. I still wonder how we could use this info in the practical application of learning or teaching an L2. Would it be helpful perhaps to explicitly point out grammatical rules that are the same in both languages to speed transfer even further? Maybe it would help to relate grammatical rules that do not exist in the L1 to similar concepts in order to imitate transfer? For example when talking about gender concord in Spanish or French, relating it to how we often refer to boats and cars as female or how women’s and men’s names have different endings much like masculine and feminine nouns…
This study used ERPs to compare speakers of various L2s to their L1 counterparts. It provided strong evidence of transfer in the study that looked at L2 German speakers which showed they had native-like responses when grammatical rules were similar to their L1. It also highlights the difference between competence and production. In many instances, most strikingly in the test of Finnish vowel harmony, L2 learners had similar, if not the same, results as native speakers. This study shows that L2 speakers can achieve native-like processing, but this may not necessarily correlate with native-like production.
It was fascinating to find out about brain responses to violations to L2 grammatical rules in the early stages. It mentioned the acquisition of L2 grammatical rules through the use of inductive learning and I started wondering if the brain would have a different response if there could be a study to compare various teaching methods.
This article presented several very interesting ideas. One was that for language learners, comprehension usually precedes production. I personally have found this to be true because I notice that in my L2 when a native speaker is speaking to me I understand what they are saying, but to hold a fast paced conversation I sometimes have to rely on responding in a mix of the L2 and L1 or just the L1 because I can’t produce sentences back fast enough just in the L2.
Another thing I liked about the article is that it brings ERP into the picture. While traditionally we’ve often seen a lot of grammaticality judgements or sentence interpretation tasks in linguistics, this article explains why ERPs are a better way of judging linguistic competence, because: “The use of event-related potentials (ERPs) meets all of these criteria; that is, they reveal online processing, differentially reflect lexical and syntactic processing, and are sensitive to developmental changes.”
It was also nice to see all these studies with transfer, which we’ve already discussed a lot in class and see the results of these ERP studies. To me it looked like there is a lot of evidence for transfer because people who’s L1 had more similar aspects to the L2 they were learning were often able to have more similar results to a native speaker of the L2 earlier than someone who’s L1 is a lot different.
I also agree with the idea that comprehension precedes production when we learn languages. Maybe many people have experienced the frustration that they cannot speak/response fluently even though they can understand what they are said. Since ERP was new knowledge to me in the last class, it was interesting that our EEG react to linguistic errors. Seeing the actual figures of ERPs helps us a lot when we think about language competence.
I thought it was interesting that participants had much stronger neurological response to more marked linguistic forms. For example, French L2 learners showed little response to violations of the unpronounced singular/plural article distinction, but displayed a great response to pronounced agreement on French verbs after just a few weeks. I also thought it was interesting that language similarity seems to affect morphosyntax grammaticalization more than phonological. The Finnish vowel harmony study found native-like responses to violations in vowel harmony. I found this surprising because other studies have shown people need to acquire a language’s phonology before the age of six in order to have native production levels. These studies may highlight the difference between linguistic competence and production.
I agree that this article addresses pertinent points about transfer. L2 learners internalize different “rules” at different paces depending on the similarity of the rules to those of their L1. For example, L1 English learners of French showed little neural response to article/noun gender agreement errors (a grammatical rule that does not exist in English), yet they showed a heightened sensitivity to subject/verb agreement errors (the rule in French being similar to that in English).
The article goes on to discuss the role that phonological cues play in identifying grammatical errors, especially in regards to an L2 learner’s processing of morphemes by way of responding to “pseudo words”. It seems that phonological cues, however, play less of a role in morphosyntactic agreement, which may be influenced more by L1 and L2 similarity.
I thought the article’s final comments about stages of language development were interesting, especially for teachers, noting that learners progress through “discrete stages of learning” in which memorization precedes the learning of rules.
It was suggested, however, that perhaps “learners are memorizing probabilistic dependencies between nonadjacent morphemes” rather than simply memorizing words/sequences of words. Instead they memorize the patterns of related words and their morphemes (for example, in subject/verb agreement: “Ils” in French is often associated with a verb ending in “-ent”). L2 learners learn these dependencies first, only later progressing to comprehension of the rules that dictate the dependencies.
With regard to the grammaticalization of the learners’ L2, it seems that the distance between each speakers L1 and L2 is inversely correlated to the intensity of the P600. The authors account for intersubject variability and did not examine in detail grammatical proximity of speakers’ L1 and L2 but despite this they were able to draw important conclusions relating to the brain responses to grammatical rules during the first year of language instruction. The variability and apparent discontinuity of grammatical internalization during this phase could be attributed to the creation of an interlanguage in the brain that gradually transitions from N400 to P600 signals as the learner becomes more familiar with the grammatical rules of the L2. The inductive learning mechanisms that the authors refer to concerning the acquisition of L2 grammar rules could also be construed as evidence for Universal Grammar, since there seems to be an incomplete “transfer of L1 grammatical processing resources”.
The two aspects the study shows; similar agreement rules in L1&L2 are grammaticalized relatively quickly, ERP response to gender concord violation was a good example on that. And I agree with the argument that some grammatical aspects allow speakers to transfer their native language knowledge to their L2. The second aspect is that the influence of L1, the level of linguistic structure and phonological information provide a clearer understanding of how and when learners acquire aspects of L2. And the important point is that the brain response to violation of L2 rules consistently changes, in other words; learners progress through discontinuous stages from the first year of instruction. In the first stages, there is no complete transfer of L1 grammatical processing when acquiring L2.
It was interesting to see through the ERP response experiments, the correlation between grammaticalization and L2 learning over time. This emphasizes the theory that L2 aquisition differs depending on the similarities between the L1 and the L2. The “grammaticalization” refers also to the discussions we have recently had in class about the phonological differences of languages, and one’s ability to transfer that L1 knowledge to the L2.
In the article, the authors mention an experiment which tested Native French speakers and German learners of French. Their results showed that phonological cues play an important role in the learning and processing of grammatical morphemes. (p136) The P600 response was especially large in errors which were phonologically apparent, while silent errors were for the most part dismissed.
This article helped me to understand the ways in which the P600 and N400 responses can help linguists understand someone’s comprehension of the language they are learning.
I was particularly intrigued by the idea that for L1 learners, comprehension will precede production. I have noticed this both as a teacher and a learner of a second language. It can be frustrating to understand everything that is being said in a conversation, yet not be able to participate because you either do not have the vocabulary necessary to respond, or do not have the ability to hold a grammatical, intelligible conversation.
I also found to reference to L2 ERP responses to gender concord violations to be interesting; because nouns in English have no gender, it is to be expected that L1 English speakers learning German would have problems learning noun gender. However, I noticed this semester that the two L1 Spanish speakers in my classroom who are learning German have a much easier time learning the gender for nouns. They only seem to encounter problems when the gender of the noun in German is different than the gender of the noun in Spanish (ex. moon is feminine in Spanish, but masculine in German). They tend to revert back to the Spanish gender when using the object in conversation and will occasionally frown or look confused when I refer to the noun by a new gender.
The cross sectional experiment conducted on learners of German also intrigued me. The author notes that experiment was conducted on different levels of German learners using only regular verbs with no stem vowel changes. I found myself if the results would have been different if the experiment had included stem vowel changing verbs. In my experience, I have found that students often forget about the vowel change, and conjugate the verb with the verb’s regular vowel in place. Because of this, I wonder if the results would have shown no P600 effect in the L2 German learners.
Concrete evidence of an interlanguage by way of a biphasic N400/P600 response is nice to have, since beforehand it seemed like an abstract thing that MAYBE existed.
I’d be curious to see a longitudinal study where students’ study habits were also tracked so as to see whether people who studied hard shifted from N400 to P600 faster than those who did not.
It is very interesting to see that this study proved that transfer does exist. Especially the fact that study shows consistent change in learners’ brain responses when they make grammatical mistakes during the first year of instruction really strikes me.
I found the evidence of transfer interesting, although the evidence seemed to support what is already believed for the most part, that grammatical rules present in L1 are more easily and quickly learned in an L2 and that those not present are still possible to learn but it takes more time. I was surprised to see the quick acquisition of the Finnish vowel agreement rules by English L1 learners, as this was the only finding that seemed to stray from what we know of transfer. I still wonder how we could use this info in the practical application of learning or teaching an L2. Would it be helpful perhaps to explicitly point out grammatical rules that are the same in both languages to speed transfer even further? Maybe it would help to relate grammatical rules that do not exist in the L1 to similar concepts in order to imitate transfer? For example when talking about gender concord in Spanish or French, relating it to how we often refer to boats and cars as female or how women’s and men’s names have different endings much like masculine and feminine nouns…
This study used ERPs to compare speakers of various L2s to their L1 counterparts. It provided strong evidence of transfer in the study that looked at L2 German speakers which showed they had native-like responses when grammatical rules were similar to their L1. It also highlights the difference between competence and production. In many instances, most strikingly in the test of Finnish vowel harmony, L2 learners had similar, if not the same, results as native speakers. This study shows that L2 speakers can achieve native-like processing, but this may not necessarily correlate with native-like production.
It was fascinating to find out about brain responses to violations to L2 grammatical rules in the early stages. It mentioned the acquisition of L2 grammatical rules through the use of inductive learning and I started wondering if the brain would have a different response if there could be a study to compare various teaching methods.