How Much Can We Adjust Our Second Language Grammars? Parameter Resetting

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• published: 06 Jan 2016
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How do we change our grammars when we pick up a new language? Is there a limit to how much we can shift? In this week's episode, we talk about parameter resetting in second language acquisition: how quickly we can change our transferred grammar, whether there's a difference in ability between children and adults, and whether there are some areas where we might be unable to adjust. This is Topic #57! This week's tag language: Haida! Related topics: Linguistic Baggage - Transfer in Second Language Acquisition: https://youtu.be/UB18y2ZYBiY A Principled Approach - Principles and Parameters in Universal Grammar: https://youtu.be/GbK0ls7YVN4 Last episode: Recovering History: Reconstructing Languages - https://youtu.be/p7ppktfdNCk Other of our language acquisition videos: Kids Be Fronting: Child Phonological Speech Errors - https://youtu.be/EDymvzP0uac Negative Space: Negative Evidence and Language Acquisition - https://youtu.be/a7Un06tDOn0 Child Actors and Child Judges: Testing Children's Language Abilities - https://youtu.be/NJ5lLNBabGc Find us on all the social media worlds: Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com/ Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpace Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspace/ And at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com/ ! You can also find our store at the website, https://thelingspace.storenvy.com/ Our website also has extra content about this week's topic at http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-57/ (Although it's going to be a bit before it's up, because I'm traveling for a conference just now.) We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally. Sources: There's a good discussion of parameter resetting in Lydia White's 2003 book, Second Language Acquisition and Universal Grammar, if you want more background on the topic. The Erdem study: Haznedar, B. 1997. L2 acquisition by a Turkish-speaking child: evidence for L1 influence. In E Hughes, M Hughes, and A Greenhill (eds), Proceedings of the 21st Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, 245-256. French verb movement study: White, L. 1992. Long and short verb movement in second language acquisition. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 37: 273-286. Chinese adverb study: Yuan, B. 2001. The status of thematic verbs in the second language acquisition of Chinese. Second Language Research 17: 248-272. Turkish stress study: Özçelik, Ö. 2012. Representation and acquisition of stress: the case of Turkish. PhD Thesis, McGill University. Adverbs discussion: It turns out that in the study we mentioned, French learners of English didn't place their adverbs in the same places that English speakers did, often having them appear after the tensed verb, as opposed to what we find in English. There are a few possibilities to explain this, including having another placement for adverbs later on in the sentence, as well as potentially the IP being more complex than just one solitary I, including spaces for tense, agreement, and arguably more. There are other studies that look at this in more detail, and we'll link to a couple of them here soon! Looking forward to next week!