This study compares the use of the Dutch definite articles ‘de’ and ‘het’ by three groups of learners of Dutch as an L2 with different L1 backgrounds: French, Polish and Indonesian. It was expected...Show moreThis study compares the use of the Dutch definite articles ‘de’ and ‘het’ by three groups of learners of Dutch as an L2 with different L1 backgrounds: French, Polish and Indonesian. It was expected that the French group would be most accurate in their article use when looked at the distinction between common gender and neuter gender contexts and was least likely to avoid definite article use by means of substitution (with an indefinite article) or omission due to positive language transfer effects. The Polish group was expected to perform less accurate than the French group only in terms of article use, not gender distinction. The Indonesian group was expected to perform less accurate than the French group on both fronts. In order to test the hypotheses a corpus study was conducted. The results did not confirm the hypotheses, no effects of language transfer were found.Show less
Vocalen uit canonieke babbels van Engels en Frans lerende jonge kinderen zijn geanalyseerd en vergeleken. De F1 en F2 zijn gemeten en spreidingsdiagrammen van deze formanten werden verkregen. Ook...Show moreVocalen uit canonieke babbels van Engels en Frans lerende jonge kinderen zijn geanalyseerd en vergeleken. De F1 en F2 zijn gemeten en spreidingsdiagrammen van deze formanten werden verkregen. Ook de vocaalratio is gemeten door de F1 door de F2 te delen. Zowel de verschillende vocalen als de gemiddelden van alle vocalen zijn geanalyseerd. Er zijn geen significante verschillen gevonden tussen de vocaalratio’s van de baby’s uit een Engelse taalomgeving en baby’s uit een Franse taalomgeving. Het resultaat van deze studie biedt steun voor de theorie dat babbelen vooral een universeel proces is, dat tot stand komt door de compositie van het spraakkanaal en de nog niet volledig ontwikkelde controle over taaluitingen en het spraakkanaal.Show less
This paper presents a study of article omission in two types of headlines, focusing on the differences between article omission in printed headlines and article omission in digital headlines. The...Show moreThis paper presents a study of article omission in two types of headlines, focusing on the differences between article omission in printed headlines and article omission in digital headlines. The study is carried out on a corpus of 120 news items collected from ‘De Volkskrant’, with half of the material from the physical paper and the other half from the corresponding digital news items. The research reflects on earlier findings in the field of article omission and presents new findings regarding the differences between article omission in physical and digital headlines and regarding other determiners that can be omitted as well. A theory about shifting the focus of investigation to the realization of articles instead of the omission thereof, initiated by Oosterhof and Rawoens (2017), is further elaborated.Show less
In order to find out more about figure-ground relationships in motion events, the central question for this study was whether describing a figure-ground motion event influences the degree to which...Show moreIn order to find out more about figure-ground relationships in motion events, the central question for this study was whether describing a figure-ground motion event influences the degree to which participants remember a video. Choi, Goller, Hong, Ansorge and Yun (2018) found a difference between German and Korean speakers with regard to how they encode different aspects of figure-ground relationships in their speech. This study aims to build on the findings of Choi et al. (2018) and make a small contribution to the question how figure-ground relationships are encoded in speakers’ minds in different languages. To investigate this, 54 target videos were created, divided over 9 different categories that all depicted a different motion type. Two versions of each video were created, one depicting a canonical direction of motion and the other a reverse direction. In the first part of the experiment, the description task, two groups of participants were given a different task. The motion description group (18 participants, L1 Dutch, 16 participants L2 English, 2 participants L2 French, Bulgarian and/or Japanese) was asked to describe the motions they saw in a video, the object description group (24 participants, L1 Dutch, L2 English, 10 participants L2 French, German, Italian and/or Swedish) got the task to describe the objects. Participants filled out a language background questionnaire during part two, the intermission, and in part three, the recall task, participants from both groups had to judge whether they had seen a video during the first part or not. For each category in the recall task there were 2 true videos (videos participants had seen before in the description task) and 4 deviant videos (videos they had not seen before in the description task). A repeated measures ANOVA was conducted for which proportion correct, category type, exposure status (true or deviant), canonicity (canonical or reverse) and participant group (motion or object description) were entered as variables. The results showed that while there was no difference between the groups, there were differences between the put over/under category and the hook category, the put on loose support and the put through category, the put on tight attachment and put through, and the put through and hook category, and whether the videos were true or deviant. I conclude that these factors influence the amount of correct judgments the participants make and discuss what the implications for these conclusions might be in the context of the influence of language on cognition.Show less
Within sign language poetry there is a genre that has not been the subject of scientific research yet, even though it has been around for quite some time: visual vernacular. It differentiates...Show moreWithin sign language poetry there is a genre that has not been the subject of scientific research yet, even though it has been around for quite some time: visual vernacular. It differentiates itself from other types of sign language literature in that it hardly ever uses anything but iconic signs, and this is what makes it internationally comprehensible across sign language borders. It is even understandable to audiences who do not have any knowledge of a sign language. Besides iconic signs, it uses many cinematographic techniques such as role switching from and to different subject or objects within the story. Visual vernacular is different from another type of sign language literature called classifier stories mainly in that the latter uses sign language specific lexicon which visual verancular does not. Another similar form of art, this time outside the sign language realm, is pantomime, but this is different from visual vernacular in many ways, one of the most prominent of which is that pantomime performers are only the storyteller whereas visual vernacular performers swith between the storyteller, main protagonist and any other subject or object in the story. By making a literary overview and using a dataset of different types of visual vernacular stories, this thesis provides an inter and intra sign language poetry genre comparison.Show less
Talmy’s (1985;2007) typology classifies languages into satellite-framed (S) languages, that express Manner of motion in the main verb and Path of motion in a satellite to the verb, and verb-framed ...Show moreTalmy’s (1985;2007) typology classifies languages into satellite-framed (S) languages, that express Manner of motion in the main verb and Path of motion in a satellite to the verb, and verb-framed (V) languages, that express Path of motion in the main verb and express Manner only when explicitly foregrounded for some reason. Given this background, how do late second learners of Portuguese, whose L1 (Dutch) is characterized as an S-language, lexicalize spontaneous dynamic Motion events in their L2, which is characterized as a V-language? In this study we investigate Slobin’s Thinking For Speaking (TFS) hypothesis (1996a), which states that the language we speak influences the way we are thinking during the mental processes of preparing content for speech and that restructuring these TFS patterns during second language acquisition may be difficult. As the L2 learners are acquiring a language that differs typologically from their L1, we investigate if they restructured their TFS patterns to those of the L2, or still use the TFS patterns of their L1. To do this, we look into the lexicalization patterns of Portuguese L2 (Dutch L1) learners and compare them to both Portuguese native speakers’ and Dutch native speakers’ performance. This study makes use of data gathered by the Leiden Learner Corpus (LLC) [http://hum.leiden.edu/lucl/llc], a collection of spoken and written data of Dutch learners of Romance languages. In total 42 participants were selected for this study: 11 native speakers of Dutch; 11 native speakers of Portuguese; and 20 second language learners of Portuguese. Participants’ linguistic patterns in encoding Motion events were examined by presenting them a selection of fifteen images taken from the picture book Frog where are you? (Mayer, 1969), which is regularly used in data elicitation for Motion event research. The participants were told to produce a narrative, describing as complete as possible what is happening with the boy, the dog and the frog in the pictures. The oral data was transcribed using the software Praat. The speech was divided into clauses. All the clauses that contained a spontaneous 6 dynamic Motion event, if the figure moves self-contained from one location to another (e.g. ‘The boy falls into the water’), were extracted. All verbs and modifiers were classified into the following motion categories: Manner verb (manner of motion); Path verb (direction or trajectory of motion); Manner+Path verb, (intermediate position between ‘pure’ Manner verbs and ‘pure’ Path verbs and has both a manner and a path component); Neutral verb (verb that expresses motion, but does not provide information about the manner or trajectory of motion). Native speakers of Dutch and Portuguese performed as I expected, with the Dutch speakers using more Manner verbs and the Portuguese showing a preference for Path verbs. L2 learners’ patterns of motion event lexicalization do not resemble those of either Dutch or Portuguese native speakers. This in-between pattern found in L2 learner’s production suggests two possible explanations: the first explanation builds on the theory of ‘Interlanguage’ as first proposed by Selinker in 1972 (Slabakova, 2016), which claims that the L2 system should be considered a system in its own right and not a defective copy of the target language. The second explanation builds on practical constraints of. This explanation builds on the fact that L2 learners did not possess the same amount of grammatical and lexical knowledge as the native speakers, and therefore they did not perform as native speakers of the target language.Show less
In this thesis, I will use comparative data, archaeological evidence and the social and ecological changes in our ancestors' lives, not to pinpoint the exact moment in time language came to be, but...Show moreIn this thesis, I will use comparative data, archaeological evidence and the social and ecological changes in our ancestors' lives, not to pinpoint the exact moment in time language came to be, but to make a case for why two million years ago is more likely than 50.000 years ago.Show less
Would it not be great if any child could grow up bilingual? Because of the many benefits of bilingualism, a start-up company developed a program called TuMi Mundo that attempts to make it possible...Show moreWould it not be great if any child could grow up bilingual? Because of the many benefits of bilingualism, a start-up company developed a program called TuMi Mundo that attempts to make it possible for infants to acquire a second language via non-live exposure only. This study reflects on the first experiment to test if this is indeed possible. A Head Turn Preference Procedure was conducted to test the language preference of the infants after two months of near-daily exposure. Previous studies showed that monolinguals prefer their native language and bilinguals prefer both languages equally. We compared the babies exposed to the app with a monolingual control group and found that the exposed infants indeed showed no preference, but the monolinguals did neither. This lack of expected preference in the monolinguals makes the bilingual-like behavior of the exposed infants uninterpretable. The results of this study are therefore not enough to answer the question whether non-live exposure is enough to make an infant perceive the language as native.Show less
When infants have two possible rules that they can discover in an artificial language, a prosodic rule and a structure rule, which one do they discover and does this change with development? Prior...Show moreWhen infants have two possible rules that they can discover in an artificial language, a prosodic rule and a structure rule, which one do they discover and does this change with development? Prior studies on infants’ cue weighing suggest a preference for prosodic cues for eight-month-old infants, and a preference for structure for ten-month-old infants when segmenting speech. Using a Headturn Preference Procedure with adapted stimuli from Spierings and ten Cate (2014), we compared looking times for a prosody and structure test condition. We found condition did not have a significant effect on looking time. However, ten-month-old infants had significantly longer looking times compared to the eight-month-old infants. We also found a significant difference for gender, suggesting that female infants have a preference for a different cue to discover underlying language patterns than males.Show less
Languages are not often very flexible in reordering their heads and complements. Many languages have a fixed preference, for example, for either prepositions or postpositions (Dryer, 2013). If...Show moreLanguages are not often very flexible in reordering their heads and complements. Many languages have a fixed preference, for example, for either prepositions or postpositions (Dryer, 2013). If there are any occurrences of inversion, they are either obligatory, or at least, when optional, bound by restrictions; as can be seen in Broadwell (2006). Bidayuh - an Austronesian language of Borneo, a language not very well documented - shows some peculiar inversions of preposition and noun phrase. These inversions only occur with movement. The current study examines P-DP reordering for DP’s that have moved to the front of their simple matrix clause; to the front of their embedded clause; or out of their embedded clause, to the front of the matrix clause. It looks into several different prepositions and different matrix verbs, as well as different DP complements. All three movement conditions elicit different sets of restrictions on reordering P and DP. The data are discussed in the light of Merchant’s (2002) theory of swiping and Hartman and Ai’s (2009) account of it. Unfortunately, the current study cannot draw any hard conclusions. More research is needed.Show less
Westergaard et al. (2005, 2012) have shown that some dialects of Norwegian, contrary to Standard Norwegian, may violate the Verb Second requirement in some or all types of wh-questions. Focussing...Show moreWestergaard et al. (2005, 2012) have shown that some dialects of Norwegian, contrary to Standard Norwegian, may violate the Verb Second requirement in some or all types of wh-questions. Focussing on Northern Norwegian, I discuss the optionality of the Verb Second requirement in wh-questions with simplex wh-phrases in this dialect. Based on data from Norwegian informants, as well as previous literature on this dialect, an analysis of the optionality of Verb Second will be given. This analysis builds on Sportiche’s approach on clitic movement in Romance languages (1996). It is shown that in Northern Norwegian complex wh’s move like phrases, whilst simplex wh’s can move (long-distance) as phrases as well as heads, analogous to the movement of Romance clitics. As an alternative analysis, the possibility that Northern Norwegian simplex wh’s undergo phrasal movement but merge into C0, is also discussed on the basis of the head movement account by Matushansky (2006).Show less
