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.

Creative Commons License or Rights Statement

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/41910

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May 8th, 11:00 AM May 8th, 1:00 PM

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.