Presentation Type
Poster
Start Date
5-8-2024 11:00 AM
End Date
5-8-2024 1:00 PM
Subjects
Speech acts (Linguistics) -- Philosophy, Second language acquisition-- Ability testing
Advisor
Carolyn Quam
Student Level
Undergraduate
Abstract
This line of research investigates attrition (loss of fluency) of native Mandarin language (L1) proficiency with increasing proficiency in English. English uses pitch to denote intonation (e.g., “it’s there?” versus “it’s there!”), while Mandarin uses pitch to indicate word meanings; e.g., /he/ means “drink” with a high, level tone, or “river” with a rising tone. The present study delineates between two alternative explanations for the prior finding (Quam & Creel, 2017) that English proficiency correlates with attrition of Mandarin tones, but not vowels. This pattern could be explained by 1) language assimilability (L1-L2 Assimilability Hypothesis), or 2) by tone being uniquely prone to attrition regardless of assimilability (Tone-Uniqueness Hypothesis). To distinguish these, participants completed an eye-tracked word-recognition task. They heard a spoken Mandarin word while viewing two images, and selected which image matched that word. The two images represent words which differ in tone only (tone trials), vowel only (vowel trials), or are completely different words (baseline trials). Vowel trials are further categorized as easy, medium, or hard difficulty based on the vowels’ assimilability into English. Preliminary results support the assimilability hypothesis, as proficiency in Mandarin is correlated with performance in (more difficult) vowel trials, not just tone trials.
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Included in
Second Language Impacts On First Language Processing
This line of research investigates attrition (loss of fluency) of native Mandarin language (L1) proficiency with increasing proficiency in English. English uses pitch to denote intonation (e.g., “it’s there?” versus “it’s there!”), while Mandarin uses pitch to indicate word meanings; e.g., /he/ means “drink” with a high, level tone, or “river” with a rising tone. The present study delineates between two alternative explanations for the prior finding (Quam & Creel, 2017) that English proficiency correlates with attrition of Mandarin tones, but not vowels. This pattern could be explained by 1) language assimilability (L1-L2 Assimilability Hypothesis), or 2) by tone being uniquely prone to attrition regardless of assimilability (Tone-Uniqueness Hypothesis). To distinguish these, participants completed an eye-tracked word-recognition task. They heard a spoken Mandarin word while viewing two images, and selected which image matched that word. The two images represent words which differ in tone only (tone trials), vowel only (vowel trials), or are completely different words (baseline trials). Vowel trials are further categorized as easy, medium, or hard difficulty based on the vowels’ assimilability into English. Preliminary results support the assimilability hypothesis, as proficiency in Mandarin is correlated with performance in (more difficult) vowel trials, not just tone trials.