Academic Paper |
|
|
|
|
| Title: | Referent salience affects second language article use |
| Author: | Danijela Trenkic |
| Email: | click here to access email |
| Homepage: | http://www.york.ac.uk/education/our-staff/academic/danijela-trenkic/ |
| Institution: | University of York |
| Author: | Nattama Pongpairoj |
| Institution: | Chulalongkorn University |
| Linguistic Field: | Language Acquisition |
| Abstract: | The effect of referent salience on second language (L2) article production in real time was explored. Thai (–articles) and French (+articles) learners of English described dynamic events involving two referents, one visually cued to be more salient at the point of utterance formulation. Definiteness marking was made communicatively redundant with all referents. Thai groups omitted articles more with more than with less salient referents. The results corroborate previous offline data suggestive of the salience effect for L2 users from article-less L1 backgrounds, but point against the view that this is due to the redundancy of definiteness marking. The results seem better explained by persistent grammatical competition between L1 and L2 structures, consistent with the view that language systems within a bilingual mind cannot be kept fully apart. |
|
|
|
|
This article appears in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition Vol. 16, Issue 1, which you can read on Cambridge's site or on LINGUIST . |
|
|
|
|
Back
Add a new paper Return to Academic Papers main page Return to Directory of Linguists main page |
|


