Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
open access
While monitoring eye movements during visual world paradigm studies, earlier research showed that the appropriate second noun phrase (NP2) is anticipated as upcoming referent before this NP is...Show moreWhile monitoring eye movements during visual world paradigm studies, earlier research showed that the appropriate second noun phrase (NP2) is anticipated as upcoming referent before this NP is auditorily encountered, when enough information is available to guide the anticipation process. Anticipatory effects are determined in both SVO-languages (e.g. English) and verb-final languages using case-markers (e.g. Japanese). Dutch lacks case- marking but allows verb-second SVO and verb-final SOV sentences. The aim of this study was to determine whether participants anticipate an upcoming NP2 object in Dutch SVO and SOV sentences. As SOV sentences are embedded clauses that cannot occur on their own, they were preceded by a main clause. Since we wanted to compare sentence constructions that were contentwise as equal as possible we did the same for the main SVO clauses. While linguistically encountering the two preceding main clauses, the different structure and prosody indicated already the word order of the upcoming critical sentence, i.e. SVO or SOV. For the SVO sentences, the preceding main clause, the subject NP1 and the verb provided information for object NP2 anticipation. In the SOV case, the information provided by the subject NP1 becomes extra important, as it was the only linguistic element that could be used as a guider of what element was coming next. To investigate whether the NP1 can lead NP2 anticipation, concrete and abstract NP1s preceded the NP2, such as the abstract NP1 ‘girl’ and the concrete NP1 ‘pilot’. It was hypothesized that if the NP2 was concrete, the lexical semantics of the NP provided enough information to come up with an upcoming NP2 object in SOV sentences, without the need of a verb. Overall, results showed that participants primarily preferred to look at the NP1 image during the spoken sentence. After sentence offset, a wrap-up effect of fixations to the NP2 was determined in all conditions, possibly indicating a late interpretation and integration of the NP2 with the previous constituents. Across all conditions, the NP2 image received proportionally as much fixations as the distractor images until sentence offset. This demonstrates that in both SVO and SOV sentences, upcoming NP2s were not anticipated. A possible explanation is that Dutch listeners are less pro-active anticipators because of the flexibility of Dutch word orders. The anticipatory process becomes too costly as the risk of anticipating upcoming constituents incorrectly is too high.Show less
In previous studies, digital storybooks with dynamic illustrations have been found to be beneficial for expressive language acquisition of second language learners with limited vocabularies ...Show moreIn previous studies, digital storybooks with dynamic illustrations have been found to be beneficial for expressive language acquisition of second language learners with limited vocabularies (Verhallen, Bus & de Jong, 2006; Verhallen & Bus, 2010). In this experiment, we examined the effects of digital storybooks with dynamic and static illustrations on the expressive vocabulary of 39 native Dutch speakers from 4 to 6 years of age. We investigated the role of visual attention at the illustrations in children’s vocabulary acquisition. Eye movements were recorded using eye-tracking methodology and showed that moving parts of the illustrations attract children’s attention. Furthermore, static illustrations were more facilitative than their dynamic counterparts for learning words expressively. In the dynamic condition longer fixation time at the depiction of targeted words was associated with lower word learning. In the static condition there was no relationship between looking behavior and word learning.Show less
