Acquiring English dative verbs: proficiency effects in German L2 learners

Acquiring English dative verbs: proficiency effects in German L2 learners Christoph Wolk * (christoph.wolk@frias.uni-freiburg.de), Sascha Wolfer † , Peter Baumann † , Barbara Hemforth ‡ , Lars Konieczny *† * Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, Starkenstr. 44 D-79104 Freiburg i. Br. , Germany † Center for Cognitive Science, University of Freiburg, Friedrichstr. 50 D-79098 Freiburg i. Br. , Germany ‡ Laboratoire de Psychologie et de Neuropsychologie Cognitives, CNRS, Universite Paris Descartes, 71 ave Edouard Vaillant, 92100 Boulogne-Billancourt, France Abstract This paper investigates the influence of probabilistic informa- tion in the second language on the processing of English da- tive alternation constructions in German learners of English. We present two eye-tracking studies (visual world and reading) with evidence that the probabilistic patterns of the target lan- guage influence L2 processing when the initial preference is vi- olated, and indications that these patterns have a greater effect on more experienced speakers. We also observed a constrast- effect of L1, such that comprehenders expected constructions that occur more often in L2 than in L1, even if L2 lexical statis- tics suggested otherwise. Keywords: Sentence processing, dative alternation, second language acquisition, expectation-based language processing Introduction In many languages, semantically dative sentences can be re- alized with two different object orders that only slightly dif- fer in meaning, one in which the recipient comes before the theme and one where the reverse is true. In English, the for- mer ordering is achieved by two bare noun phrases, as in (1-a), and the latter by having the recipient as a prepositional phrase, as in (1-b). (1) a. b. double object dative (DO) I gave [her] recipient [the book] theme . prepositional dative (PO) I gave [the book] theme to [her] recipient . The dative alternation has received considerable attention from first- and second language acquisition researchers dur- ing the 1980s, especially from the perspective of genera- tive grammar. These studies focused primarily on investigat- ing the following two questions by means of grammatical- ity judgments and sentence completion tasks: First, how well do learners acquire hard constraints on the possibility of al- ternation, such as the fixed prepositional realization of most verbs of Latin origin such as donate; second, what is the order in which speakers acquire the possible realizations for verbs that do alternate. Major results (e.g. in Mazurkewich, 1985; Mazurkewich & White, 1984) were that verb-specific con- straints are acquirable as hard constraints for first language learners with rare errors, but are only learned as softer con- straints — or sometimes not learned at all — for second lan- guage learners. With regard to acquisition order, the preposi- tional dative realization tends to be acquired earlier and easier for second language learners. Recent research on first language (L1) dative alternation patterns, however, has switched the focus from presumably ’hard’ constraints on the possibility of alternation to the softer, probabilistic determinants of actually observed vari- ation. This was motivated by cross-linguistic similarities in grammatical preferences (Bresnan, Dingare, & Manning, 2001) as well as the fact that in both naturally occurring lan- guage and experimental investigation ’hard’ constraints turn out to be surprisingly violable (Bresnan & Nikitina, 2008; Bresnan, 2007) while simultaneous consideration of multi- ple ’soft’ constraints led to considerable success in predic- tion of realizations, reading time, and fluency of production (Bresnan, Cueni, Nikitina, & Baayen, 2007; Bresnan & Ford, 2010; Tily et al., 2009). With regard to acquisition, children have been shown to mirror the probabilistic realization pat- terns of their environment (Marneffe, Grimm, Arnon, Kirby, & Bresnan, to appear). Second language studies within this probabilistic paradigm, however, are still rare; one exception is the study by Frishkoff, Levin, Pavlik, Idemaru, and Jong (2008), who used the results of (Bresnan et al., 2007) to in- vestigate how both native and second language (L2) speak- ers learn to predict dative choice from examples, and found that L2 learners improve quickly when presented with stimuli containing a high degree of contrast between alternation pref- erences. Individual factors that were found to be reliable pre- dictors for L1 speakers in corpus models have, however, also been shown to influence L2 learning at various proficiency levels. These include among others pronominality (Le Com- pagnon, 1984), givenness and persistence (Marefat, 2005), and weight (Tanaka, 1968; Callies & Szczesniak, 2008). The goal of this paper is to investigate how attuned L2 learners are to fine probabilistic details of their target lan- guage. One predictor that is, due to its inherently probabilis- tic nature, especially suited for this research question is verb bias. More specifically, each dative verb has a specific id- iosyncratic degree of preference in alternation choice; this preference is in general not predictable from semantics or morphology. A learner’s acquisition of verb bias should thus be seen as direct instances of fundamentally experience-based learning. The experiments reported here are based on English L2 learners with German as L1. Like English, and unlike most L1s of previous studies, German has a double object da- tive; in contrast, the use of the prepositional dative is limited