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

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: • Transfer in Second Lan...
A Principled Approach - Principles and Parameters in Universal Grammar: • Principles and Parameters
Last episode:
Recovering History: Reconstructing Languages - • How Can We Know What L...
Other of our language acquisition videos:
Kids Be Fronting: Child Phonological Speech Errors - • Why Do Little Kids Mak...
Negative Space: Negative Evidence and Language Acquisition - • Is Correcting Your Kid...
Child Actors and Child Judges: Testing Children's Language Abilities - • Child Language Experim...
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Our website also has extra content about this week's topic at www.thelingspace.com/episode-57/
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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!

[@CarinaFragozo]

I'm researching parameter resetting on my PhD dissertation and a friend has just shown me your video. What a great channel, thanks for the excellent material!

[@thelingspace]

+Carina Fragozo Great! Glad that you liked it. It's a really interesting topic! What are you researching, if you don't mind my asking? ^_^

[@CarinaFragozo]

+The Ling Space Yeah, I really liked it! Well, I'm working on the phonological acquisition of English by native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese. I'm analyzing 3 phonological processes: 1) Stress shift, which occurs in both languages in the same way; 2) Voice assimilation, which occurs in both languages, but in a different way; 3) The relation between syllable and stress, which is totally different in both languages. The aim is to find what is easier for these learners: 1) to acquire a rule that occurs in their L1; 2) to modify a phonological rule; or 3) to reset a parameter. That's why I loved your video :)

[@thelingspace]

+Carina Fragozo That sounds really interesting! I really like L2 phonology stuff. I hope you'll let us know more about how your results play out! ^_^

[@msy5535]

I have always felt that Children learn/ acquire language with less stress than adults because they are all roughly around the same level/s to begin with. Of course there will be exceptions, but generally we have 'timeframes' do when children acquire certain morphological constraints, along with other life events (walking, eating solids etc.) As you get older, your experiences change the what you see, learn and internalise (i know it's not this simple), hence why with adults we all bring something different to the table when learning a new language.

[@pauljmorton]

I'd say pronunciation-related things are hard to flip simply mostly because muscle memory. A major part of pronunciation is physical action and incredibly finely detailed, so of course many actions that one has been doing since birth will want to override anything else.

[@thelingspace]

+Paul J. Morton Yeah, although I don't personally think that's the whole story, it's definitely a part of it. We got into a discussion of this with another commenter back on our Tumblr, if you want to check out that conversation: thelingspace.tumblr.com/post/137653069044/seouliloquy-thelingspace-how-do-we-change

[@shabnamkaun]

great channel

[@Camerinus]

At 5:05 "Vont les fées à l'école" is actually ungrammatical in French. "Les fées vont à l'école." = "The fairies go to school" - OK Two ways to formulate the question: "Les fées vont-elles à l'école?" or "Est-ce que les fées vont à l'école?" But note: "Elles vont à l'école." → "Vont-elles à l'école?" = "They go to school." → "Do they go to school?"

[@thelingspace]

+Camerinus Thanks for bringing this up! Going to reply to this in more detail in the other thread on this topic.

[@faderoseamer]

+The Ling Space Also, "Jones vieillit pas beaucoup." is a bit strange. It is what you would expect in spoken language, but not in written language. In written language, it would be "Jones *ne* viellit *pas* beaucoup." With "ne" and "pas" together meaning "not". In spoken language, we usually drop the "ne", but definitely not in written language.

[@Camerinus]

+faderoseamer OK, but in many ways linguists are more interested in the "real" thing ─i.e. spoken language─ than in the heavily codified written language. French is probably the most codified written language in the world ─ to ridiculous levels, with an Académie française which dictates what's right and wrong. It's actually a good thing, in my view, that French is quickly losing its status as a world language. I like to point out to French "purists" (i.e. French prescriptivist grammarians) that French is just the most corrupt version of Latin out there.

[@faderoseamer]

Camerinus Well, I would guess it is commonly accepted that "ne ... pas" is the correct way to express negation in French. Dropping the "ne" is used only in spoken language, and not even all the time. I don't see any point in dividing spoken and written languages as "real" and "unreal". They are part of the same thing, and influence each other. Also, as much as the Académie Française likes to thinks it has a strong power on the way French speakers use their language, they don't. It decides the standards for the govermnent, but apart from that, they have little influence. As a recent example, the Académie française opposed itself to the female version of the word "auteur" ending with an "e", most of the people today write it as "auteure".

[@thelingspace]

+faderoseamer It is true that in written French, using "ne ... pas" is more common. Outside of the larger point that linguistics usually does more focus on spoken language rather than written language, there was a more practical concern driving why we chose just to use "pas" alone: having only the single word for negation makes the example and the comparison with English clearer. And since it is a commonly accepted option, I don't think it's a wrong choice to make. Interestingly, over the history of French, we've gone from just having the "ne" for negation to the pairing of "ne ... pas", and if current trends in the spoken language continue, we may end up with just "pas" in the future. Although that'll probably be beyond what we'll see. ^_^

[@ArturoStojanoff]

I read a paper in class once that talked about how we even kind of mimic the way children acquire native languages. And then I noticed it in my German class. In German, the verb phrase is head final (einen Apfel essen), but it generally moves to the head position of the tense phrase when that is vacant in main clauses (Ich esse den Apfel). Many of my fellow students at the German class, however, would sometimes leave the verb at the end, even if it's a main clause with no overt tense head (Ich den Apfel esse), even though that does not happen in our native language. I found that pretty interesting.

[@GregSanders]

Well, it's a relief to know that adults can flip switches at least in many cases, there's hope for me yet. It was also fascinating that one of the things we have trouble doing between languages is dropping stress if we use stress in our native language. Is there any sort of pattern to the stuck switches, like do Mandarin speakers have trouble dropping tones when going to a toneless language?

[@artugert]

Actually, tones would be more accurately described as pitch contour and pitch register. The tones of Mandarin are all sounds that we make sometimes when speaking English, as well. It's just that changing the pitch of the sound doesn't alter the meaning of the word. Native Mandarin speakers don't think about a word being a particular tone. To them, that is just a fundamental part of what makes up that word. When they learn English, they don't have any trouble dropping tones. That is, they don't start arbitrarily assigning tones to words. But they do have trouble learning getting down the rhythm, stress, intonation, etc. of a native English speaker.

[@ilsrclasses8379]

Moti, great job! Watching all your videos! Can you please put "ne" before the verbs when using negations in French?

[@thelingspace]

Glad you like them! And in our most recent video, we did! We've generally left it out because it's becoming omitted more frequently in spoken French, and because we felt it made the examples clearer about the location of negation. But at this point, I think we've decided we can have it show up and hopefully still keep it clear. Thanks for watching! ^_^

[@cerberaodollam]

I started to learn English at about 8. In writing, everybody assumes I'm American, which is cool I guess - but using my mouth, that's a different story :D

[@ihath]

cool channel

[@thelingspace]

+ihath Thanks! ^_^

[@jocrane1529]

I love how the Gunnerkrigg references were just casually thrown in with no explanation. FYI, though, Jeanne's name is pronounced like . . . like "John" would be if you were to use the same "J" sound as in "Taj Mahal." (I'm sure there's a better way of explaining that, but unfortunately I'm not a linguist. =-P)

[@thelingspace]

+Jo Crane That'd be with a [ʒ], the voiced post-alveolar fricative. ^_^ And yeah, that's usually how we try to do it - we don't want to be distracting if people don't get it, but we want it to be clear for the people who do. Thanks for catching it, and for the explanation. ^^

[@jocrane1529]

+The Ling Space Ah, thank you!

[@robertandersson1128]

What?! All languages don’t have stress? This was really choking to me, my native language, Swedish, is super sensitive to stress and intonation so I almost can’t believe other language have stress at all. I think all the other Indo-European language I speak, i.e. German and Russian, have have stress but I’m not really sure, I’ll have to check that. Well, thanks for the heads up, now I can think about that next time I study Turkish. ☺

[@artugert]

I'm not sure I agree with the notion of "unflippable switches". It's just that some parameters take more training than others to get down. With some skill and a lot of determination, as well as the right methods, environment, and enough time, I believe it is possible to speak a second language in a way nearly indistinguishable from a native speaker. To be 100% the same, though, may be impossible, unless one starts sufficiently early (before the age of 10 perhaps?). I think what it takes is a transformation of the self, and notions about your identity. To learn a second language well is to assimilate into another culture.

[@melodi996]

I don't think there's such a thing as ideal language, watching videos where every creator has different accent, you can really pronoounce English half-ok and still sound as native speaker, with practice it'd be not that hard.

[@Asya.Pereltsvaig]

Also, although French L2-learners of English may *sometimes* produce English-style word order with negation (and adverbs), they also keep occasionally producing the French-style sentences particularly with adverbs...

[@thelingspace]

+Asya Pereltsvaig Yep! Which is why we have the short discussion in the description, and I'll probably write a follow-up about that part, as well. The adverb data even from the study that we're citing shows that they often have the French adverb position in English, which is surprising if they're always doing the movement. And there are different ways to try to address that, like splitting up the IP, or considering different adverb positions, which we independently want to say exist. As I'm pretty sure you know (being another former McGill person and all), there's a broader question of what's noise and what's data in L2 speech, too. There's generally a higher error rate in L2 speech, such that often the criterion for what we're considering as having acquired it end up being, say, 80% or 85% correct. You can look at that from one side and say, well, those people are still significantly different from native speakers, so they don't totally have it down. But at the same time, they've definitely acquired something. What underlies that behaviour is a big question for L2 research, and it crops up in a bunch of different ways. I think the adverb stuff here is really something else happening, but I'm not as sure about the negation, where it seems like maybe occasionally getting it wrong is just actually occasionally getting it wrong. I could be wrong on that myself, though! ^_^

[@Asya.Pereltsvaig]

+The Ling Space Of course. And there's also an issue of production vs. grammaticality judgments, which may differ... A lot more can be said about this...

[@thelingspace]

+Asya Pereltsvaig For sure! Actually, doing an episode on the asymmetry between production and comprehension might actually be a good idea - I know that I find that a really interesting topic. I'll stick that on the list!

[@Asya.Pereltsvaig]

+The Ling Space Great idea, thanks!

[@Pining_for_the_fjords]

I don't speak French, but I always thought it placed stress on the last syllable of most words.

[@thelingspace]

+Conway79 Thanks for the comment! Yeah, the argument I'm going on here is that that actually isn't stress, but a kind of intonational prominence on final syllables that is phonetically distinct from stress. Stress is usually characterized by increases in duration or intensity, or a sharp rise in F0, whereas in French, we don't see any of those. There are also a bunch of other things that correlate with stress that don't fit French or Turkish. So I'm going with the idea that French and Turkish don't have regular stress (and regular feet), whereas English does. In his PhD thesis, which I've cited in the video description, he goes through the French examples, but for a more succinct presentation, I've linked to a paper by Özçelik in another comment thread that runs through the argument in Turkish: pages.iu.edu/~oozcelik/papers/Turkish%20stress%20-%20Phonology.pdf

[@Watcher863]

This is a Gunnerkrigg episode, isn't it?

[@thelingspace]

+Watcher863 It definitely is a Gunnerkrigg episode, yeah. ^_^

[@LeomhannCeilteach]

"Vont les fées à l' école"... ever considered hiring native proofreaders??

[@qwertyTRiG]

I'm conscious that I use English-syle stress in French, but I can't stop it. (My French is pretty poor these days anyway.)

Aren't French words stressed on their last syllables?

[@talideon]

+Étienne Murase Eh, yeah. But that's not really the issue here. The issue is something called 'isochrony'. English is a _stress-timed_ language (the same goes for most if not all of the Germanic languages, as it happens - Icelandic is an exception I know about), whereas French and Turkish are _syllable-timed_ languages. This is what Moti is referring to. This difference in isochrony most obviously affects the a language's rhythm (and that rhythm is hard people to shake off from their L1, even if their accent, grammar, and syntax are otherwise perfect), but it also affects the sounds of a language. Stress timing leads to vowel reduction, which is why vowels in unstressed syllables are often reduced down. If you want examples of English speakers who tend to use syllable-timing rather than stress-timing, listen to people from India and Wales.

[@agoderich]

+Cíat Ó Gáibhtheacháin Isochrony != stress. His terminology is incorrect.

[@talideon]

+郭育賢 It's not quite that he's wrong so much as he's playing a little fast-and-loose with the terminology.

[@thelingspace]

+TRiG (Ireland) Yeah, it's really difficult to avoid. My French isn't super, either, but I can't really get rid of it. My Japanese still has too much stress in it as well, sadly, and I doubt I'll ever get rid of that, either.

[@Adrian-it6uh]

Your sentence "Vont les fées à l'école?" should be "Les fées vont-elles à l'école?" or equivalently "Vont-elles à l'école?", I don't know why though!

[@user-jc9yf1mp9j]

+Adrian Gammon Or the far easier "Est-ce que les fées vont à l'école?", "les fées vont à l'école, n'est pas?", or the easiest of them all, "Les fées vont à l'école?" (with an upward intonation!) Basically, there are a lot of ways to ask the exact same question in French, and I'm fairly certain his isn't wrong. I'll have to email my French professor though!

[@thelingspace]

+Andrew Wiest Yeah, that's definitely true - this isn't the only way to ask the question, and as you note, the intonational one is probably the most common, particularly in spoken informal contexts. But our director is a native French speaker, and she gave the example a thumbs-up, so I feel pretty good about this version of the question being a good one. ^_^

[@Camerinus]

+The Ling Space I just saw Adrian's comment after I posted mine. "Vont les fées à l'école?" is definitely ungrammatical. I'm surprised this wasn't caught by the French speakers on your team.

[@piouppioup]

+The Ling Space Is she from Québec? Because in Parisian French, that doesn't work at all, but I don't know much about Québec French.

[@Camerinus]

+piouppioup I'm from Québec; it doesn't work at all here either.

[@frankharr9466]

I do NOT understand headedness. I need to watch that video again. Maybe English has split headedness. That's the only way this makes sense to me.

[@Asya.Pereltsvaig]

Mistake: in English, the noun (complement) comes AFTER the preposition (head), not BEFORE. You've misspoke there.

[@thelingspace]

+Asya Pereltsvaig Ah... yeah. In the part where I walk through the sentence, I have it right, but the later part, I flipped them. Sigh. Thanks for bringing it to my attention! I'll stick in an annotation.

[@Asya.Pereltsvaig]

+The Ling Space Sure, happens to us all.