"Kissine offers a new theory of speech acts which is philosophically sophisticated and builds on work in cognitive science, formal semantics, and linguistic typology. This highly readable, brilliant essay is a major contribution to the field."
Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2003 09:17:24 -0700 From: Hang Du <dhang@email.arizona.edu> Subject: Effects of the Second Language on the First
Vivian Cook, ed. (2003) Effects of the Second Language on the First, Multilingual Matters, Second Language Acquisition Series.
Hang Du, University of Arizona
OVERVIEW
This book consists of 13 chapters. Each chapter is an independent paper by different authors. Most of these papers were given at the International Workshop on Effects of the Second Language on the First Language, organized by Vivian Cook, held in Wivenhoe House, Colchester, University of Essex, UK, in 2001. The book is intended for researchers in second language acquisition and bilingualism, as well as teachers and students around the world.
SYNOPSIS
Chapter 1. The Changing L1 in the L2 User's Mind, by Vivian Cook. In this introductory chapter, Cook gives an overview of the book. He introduces the overarching framework of the book, his "multi-competence" concept, which refers to "knowledge of two or more languages in one mind" (e.g. Cook, 1991). In this "multi-competence" system, bilingual and multilingual speakers' languages are not isolated from each other. On the contrary, they are constantly interacting with each other. He also questions the use of the native speaker as the yardstick against which to measure the achievement of an L2 learner. He argues that crosslinguistically, knowing more than one language is the norm, not the exception. He prefers the word "L2 user" rather than "L2 learner" because the objective of learning a second language is to become an effective L2 user, and "SLA research has to do justice to its constituency -- people who know two languages -- not to subordinate them to people who know only one language" (p. 4). He suggests that the relationship between the L1 and L2 in the bilingual's mind is an "integration continuum" (p. 6), and the effects that the L2 can have on the L1 could be positive, negative or neutral. Finally he discusses some methodological issues related to the research on the L2 to L1 effects.
Chapter 2. The Influence of L2 on L1 Collocational Knowledge and on L1 Lexical Diversity in Free Written Expression, by Batia Laufer. This chapter reports two studies about Hebrew's influence on the Russian vocabulary of Russian immigrants in Israel. The first study was a grammaticality judgment test of some collocations in Russian, which showed clear influence of Hebrew. The second study was free composition in Russian. The author found that the subjects' judgment of collocations of Russian showed influence of Hebrew. The longer the subjects were in the L2 environment, the more ready they were to accept Russian collocations with Hebrew influence. The author calls this direct influence of the L2. The subjects' lexical diversity and variation in their free composition in Russian also declined after a long period of residence in Israel, as well as the overall length of their essays. The author calls this indirect influence of the L2. The author intentionally avoids the term "attrition" because the subjects were using Russian as much as Hebrew in their daily lives. The interaction between the L1 and L2 is viewed more positively, as acquiring multi-competence (Cook, 1991, 1992).
Chapter 3. 'I Feel Clumsy Speaking Russian': L2 Influence on L1 in Narratives of Russian L2 Users of English, by Aneta Pavlenko. The author made four 3-minute silent films with sound track but no dialogue and asked the subjects to describe what happened in the films. The focus of this study was a group of late Russian/English bilinguals, Russian immigrants who moved to the US between 10 and 27. They used both Russian and English on a daily basis and were determined to maintain their Russian. Production patterns from this group were compared to those from two other groups: a group of Russian/English bilinguals growing up in the US, and a group of American University students who were learning Russian as a second language. The influence of English on the late bilinguals' Russian was found in the lexicon and semantics, morphosyntax and linguistic framing. For example, the late bilinguals showed violations of Russian case marking rules due to the influence of English. Along these lines, the author points at promising directions for further research. She also argues that the interaction between L1 and L2 should be interpreted in a positive way, from Cook's (1991, 1992) multi-competence perspective.
Chapter 4. The Intercultural Style Hypothesis: L1 and L2 Interaction in Requesting Behavior, by Jasone Cenoz. This study was about pragmatics between a group of Spanish speakers who were also fluent in English and a group of Spanish speakers who were not fluent in English. The main instrument was a discourse completion test (DCT) using four request situations. The "fluent in English" group took the test in both English and Spanish. The 'non-fluent in English' group took it only in Spanish. The subjects' use of five elements in the test, alerters, request strategies, syntactic downgraders, lexical and phrasal downgraders, and mitigating supportives were calculated and analyzed. The author found that there was no difference between the "fluent in English" group's performance in the two languages. But there were differences between the "fluent in English" and "non-fluent in English" groups' performance in Spanish. The subjects who were fluent in English use "their interlocutor's first names more often, use more indirect strategies and have a wider range of syntactic downgraders, lexical downgraders and mitigating supportives" (P. 77) in their Spanish requests. Based on the findings of this study, the author suggests that multilingual competence should not be assumed as the sum of the different competences in the individual languages involved.
Chapter 5. Probing the Effects of the L2 on the L1: A Case Study, by Scott Jarvis. This study was about a Finnish immigrant living in the US. The subject's first language, Finnish, had fully developed before she moved to the US as an adult. She had been living in the US for 11 years at the time of the study. She used English about half of the time, and Finnish the other half in her daily life. The author designed four tasks to test the influence of English on her Finnish. The first was recording her natural use of Finnish. He identified 15 of her patterns in Finnish that were not considered conventional use by monolingual Finnish speakers. They were categorized into Grammar, Lexicosemantics and Idiom. Based on these patterns, he made some silent films for the subject to describe. But she did not use any of the patterns found in her natural speech. The author also asked her to judge the grammaticality of some sentences, including the 15 target patterns. She accepted 9 of them. Finally the author interviewed her about the 15 patterns. She identified 12 of them as deviant for Finnish speakers, but accepted 7 of the 12 deviant patterns herself. The author discusses these results in the light of his three research questions. He concludes that instead of being interpreted as evidence of the subject's L1 attrition, the results show that the L2 has added more ways to express the same concepts in the subject's language competence.
Chapter 6. English from a Distance: Code-mixing and Blending in the L1 Output of Long-Term Resident Overseas EFL Teachers, by Graeme Porte. This study was a follow-up based on a nationwide survey of 52 native EFL teachers living in Spain, who had expressed concerns about their own attrition in English after long-term residence in Spain. The conversation data of three native EFL teachers who had been living in Spain for 15-24 years were analyzed for deviant patterns in their English due to the influence of Spanish, a language they were also fluent in. Results showed that the subjects' average number of deviant expressions in English was 2 out of 100 words. Most of these errors were examples of code-mixing, inserting Spanish words into English sentences. Most of these Spanish words were specific to the topics that the subjects were talking about (school-related issues). No evidence was found that these subjects' grammar in English had undergone significant attrition after so many years' residence abroad.
Chapter 7. Productivity and Lexical Diversity in Native and Non-Native Speech: A Study of Cross-cultural Effects, by Jean-Marc Dewaele and Aneta Pavlenko. The task was story-retelling based on the four films used in Chapter 3. The target was productivity and lexical diversity. Two hundred and fifty-eight subjects (half males and half females) participated in the study. They were in five groups: a group of monolingual Russian speakers; a group of monolingual English speakers; a group of Russian speakers living in the US who were interviewed in English; another group of similar Russian speakers in the US who were interviewed in Russian; a group of EFL learners in Russia. The monolingual speakers were interviewed in their native languages. The EFL learners were interviewed in English, their L2. The authors found no influence of English on the bilingual/bicultural Russian speakers' productivity and lexical diversity in their Russian.
Chapter 8. L2 Influence on L1 Linguistic Representations, by Victoria A. Murphy and Karen J. Pine. This study made use of two psychological/psycholinguistic models, Karmiloff-Smith's (1992) RR model (Representational Redescription), and Bialystok's (1991, 2001) A/C model (Analysis/Control). The authors conducted three experiments. The first one was a WUG-like test (Prasada & Pinker, 1993), comparing the performance of one group of bilingual 6-7 year-olds, and three groups of monolingual children (aged 5, 7, 9). The second experiment compared the same group of bilingual children and another three groups of monolingual children (aged 5, 7, 9) in a lexical decision task. In the third experiment, a group of monolingual and a group of bilingual (English as an L2) college students were taught some Old English nouns and their plural forms in two conditions ("salient" and "non-salient). Later they took a grammaticality judgment test involving these words. Results of the first two experiments showed that the bilingual children performed similarly to older monolingual children. But they were slower than the monolingual children in the lexical decision test, suggesting that their representations of language were more explicit than their monolingual peers. Results from Experiment 3 suggested that the "non-salient" bilingual group performed similarly to the "salient" monolingual group, suggesting that "bilinguals naturally focus their attentional skills on linguistic structure during learning (and not just in task performance)" (p, 164).
Chapter 9. Cross-linguistic Influence of L2 English on Middle Constructions in L1 French, by Patricia Balcom. The theoretical framework was some generative models of lexical semantics (Jackendoff, 1987, 1990; Levin & Pappaport, 1995). The author identified five differences in the middle construction between English and French, and tested two groups of native speakers of French at l'Université de Moncton, a Francophone university in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada. One group was proficient in English (the bilinguals), and the other group had very low proficiency in English (the monolinguals). The task was grammaticality judgment, but the subjects were also asked to correct the ungrammatical sentences. Twenty-eight French sentences with middle constructions, of the five categories mentioned above, were used. Four of these five categories were grammatical in French but not grammatical in English. The other category was ungrammatical in French but grammatical in English. Results showed that overall, the monolinguals were significantly more likely to judge the sentences as grammatical. As for the four categories that were grammatical in French but ungrammatical in English, the monolinguals judged three of them as more grammatical than the bilinguals. In the correction of ungrammatical sentences, the bilinguals used more passives than the monolinguals, which the author argued, was due to the English influence. The author concludes that even though there appear to be interactions between the two languages in a bilingual's mind, his/her "mentally represented grammars are different, but they are not deficient" (p. 188).
Chapter 10. Effects of the L2 on the Syntactic Processing of the L1, by Vivian Cook, Elisabet Iarossi, Nektarios Stellakis and Yuki Tokumaru. The authors used a standard experiment in the Competition Model paradigm (Bates & MacWhinney, 1981). It involved asking the participants to tell which noun in the sentence was the subject. According to this model, speakers of different languages rely on different cues such as Word Order, Animacy, Case and Agreement in the languages to determine subjecthood. The hypothesis was that bilinguals performed such tasks differently in their first language than monolinguals due to the influence of the additional language. Two groups of L1 speakers of three languages, Spanish, Japanese and Greek participated in the experiments. One of the two groups in each language was also learning English at the university (the bilinguals). The other group was monolingual ("minimal bilinguals"). Sentences systematically varied in the five cues were presented to the participants in their L1 for them to tell the subject of the sentence. Results showed that while no clear influence of English was found in these bilinguals' processing of their L1, two tendencies were found: "weakening of cues", and "adoption of novel cues" (p. 212). The authors argue that this shows that L2 users process sentences in their L1 differently from their monolingual counterparts.
Chapter 11. Economy of Interpretation: Patterns of Pronoun Selection in Transitional Bilinguals, by Teresa Satterfield. Couched in the Minimalist Program (Chomsky, 1995, 1998, 2000), the author offers explanations for some English-dominant Spanish speakers' ("transitionals") usage of null and overt pronouns. Lipski's (1996) pilot study of three groups of native Spanish speakers (monolinguals, "balanced bilinguals" and transitional bilinguals) revealed that the distributions of overt pronouns and pro in the transitionals' speech were different from those in monolingual Spanish speakers' speech. In particular, the transitionals tended to use overt pronouns in non-contrastive situations, where monolingual Spanish speakers preferred to use pro. Based on a Minimalist framework, the author suggests that such differences should be explained at the level of the computational system, which involves transformational operations such as Merge, Agree and Move. After detailed discussions of the operations involved in the interpretations of overt pronouns and pro, the author concludes that for such transitionals, non-focus overt subjects "require less computations than either [+referential] pro or a contrastive subject" (p 230).
Chapter 12. A Dynamic Approach to Language Attrition in Multilingual Systems, by Ulrike Jessner. This chapter is not about an empirical study. Instead, the author proposes a psycholinguistic model about language acquisition and loss by multilingual speakers, called a "dynamic model of multilingualism" (DMM) (p. 235). According to this model, contrary to traditional language acquisition research, language acquisition is not viewed as linear. The multilingual speaker's languages are constantly changing, and have to maintain a balance with each other. The interactions between a multilingual speaker's languages render it harder to maintain these languages than only one language. According to DDM, language acquisition and attrition should not be studied independent of each other. Instead, they should be seen "as an integrated part of an evolving dynamic system" (p. 242). Along these lines, the author also points out directions for further research.
Chapter 13. How to Demonstrate the Conceptual Effect of L2 on L1? Methods and Techniques, by Istvan Kecskes and Tunde Papp. This chapter discusses the effect of L2 on the L1 in a foreign language environment, where the L2 is mainly acquired in the classroom. According to the authors, in such cases, the L2 proficiency has to reach a hypothetical threshold before it can show any effect on the L1, and this effect is more conceptual than linguistic. In the first part of the chapter, the authors discuss two interacting factors that play crucial roles in the L2 to L1 influence in such an environment: 1. "Level of proficiency and the development of a Common Underlying Conceptual Base" (CUCB); 2. "nature of transfer" (p. 252). In the second part of the chapter, the authors offered detailed techniques and procedures to measure the L2 to L1 effects in three categories: 1. "structural well-formedness: sentence building and manipulation"; 2. "lexical quality"; 3. "cognitive functioning" (p. 253).
EVALUATION
As several authors have pointed out in this volume, this is probably the first collection of research papers on the effect of the L2 on the L1, which makes the book very exciting. As Cook points out in the introduction, because the monolingual native speaker has been regarded as the target for second language learners in the Second Language Acquisition (SLA) field over the years, only one direction of influence, from L1 to L2, has been extensively studied in the forms of Contrastive Analysis, transfer studies, etc. I think Cook's "multi-competence" framework is the right direction to go in SLA research, because the interactions between the L1 and L2 should be studied in both directions. Most past research on the effect of the L2 on the L1 was in the study of language attrition and loss (e.g. Weltens, et al, 1986; Seliger and Vago, 1991), but as Jarvis points out in Chapter 5, the exact process how attrition and loss happen need a lot of research.
The book's coverage of languages, theoretical frameworks, methods and linguistic areas is impressive. The L2 to L1 language pairs studied in different articles include Hebrew to Russian; English to Russian, English to Spanish, English to Finnish, Spanish to English, English to French, English to Japanese, English to Greek. Theoretical frameworks used include cognitive learning models, lexical semantics, the Minimalist Program, etc. The research methods also range from experimental to naturalistic, from group study to case study, from qualitative to quantitative analyses of data. The linguistic areas studied range from the lexicon, semantics, morpho-syntax, to pragmatics, etc.
After several decades' development in the field of SLA, it is a good time to study the "transfer" in the other direction. Because of the extensive research on Contrastive Analysis and later criticisms of it, researchers today are better equipped to study the effect of the L2 on the L1 without the pitfalls of the Contrastive Analysis (see Larsen-Freeman and Long, 1991 for a critical review of the relevant literature). The issue that I am most interesting in is, at which level does the influence of the L2 on the L1 occur? Is it at the level of performance or competence? Methodologically, using a combination of different kinds of tasks/tests has the potential to shed light on this issue, as Jarvis did in his study, reported in Chapter 5. Some of the studies reported in this book were pilot studies, so the sample sizes were small. But overall, this book has laid down a solid foundation for future research in this exciting "new" area in the field of SLA.
This book is in general free of typographic errors. The most noticeable ones are in Tables 4.3 to 4.6 (p. 68-69), where the means of the Spanish scores are 100 times bigger than what they should be.
REFERENCES
Bates, E. and MacWhinney, B. (1981). Second language acquisition from a functional perspective. In H. Winitz (Ed.). Native Language and Foreign Language Acquisition (pp. 190-214). Annals of the NY Academy of Sceience (Vol. 379). New York: New York Academy of Science.
Bialystok, E. (1991). Metalinguistic dimensions of bilingual language proficiency. In E. Bialystok (Ed.). Language Processing in Bilingual Children (pp. 113-140). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bialystok, E. (2001). Bilingualism in Development: Language, Literacy and Cognition. Cambridge University Press.
Chomsky, N. (1995). The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, N. (1998). Some observations on economy in generative grammar. In P. Barbosa, D. Fox, P. Hagstrom, M. McGinnis and D. Pesetsky (eds.) Is thte Best Good Enough? (PP. 115-128). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, N. (2000). Minimalist inquiries: The framework. In R. Martin, D. Michaels and J. Uriagereka (eds.). Step by Step (pp. 89-155). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Cook, V. (1991). The poverty of stimulus argument and multi-competence. Second Language Research 7, 103-117.
Cook, V. (1992) Evidence for multi-competence. Language Learning 42, 557-591.
Jackendoff, R. (1987). The status of thematic relations in linguistic theory. Linguistic Inquiry 18, 369-411.
Jackendoff, R. (1990). Semantic Structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Karmiloff-Smith, (1992). Beyond Modularity: A Developmental Perspective on Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Larsen-Freeman, D. and Long, M. (1991). An Introduction to Second Language Acquisition Research. New York: Longman.
Levin, B. and Rappaport, Hovav, M. (1995). Unaccusativity: At the Syntax-Lexical Semantics Interface. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lipski, J. (1996). Patterns of pronominal evolution in Cuban-American bilinguals. In A. Roca and J. Jensen (eds) Spanish in Contact (pp. 159-186). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Prasada, S. and Pinker, S. (1993). Generalization of regular and irregular morphological patterns. Language and Cognitive Processes 8, 1-56.
Seliger, H. and M. Vago. (1991). First Language Attrition. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Weltens, B, De Bot, K. and van Els, T. (eds.). (1986). Language Attrition in Progress. Dordrecht: Foris.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER:
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Hang Du is finishing her dissertation on the acquisition of the Chinese
ba-construction by English speakers in the Interdisciplinary Ph.D.
Program in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (SLAT) at the
University of Arizona. Her research interests include bilingualism, the
acquisition of Chinese syntactic structures by English speakers, and
the acquisition of English syntactic structures by Chinese speakers.
