Misc - Exam

Question 1

What are your articles’ main claims concerning SLA?

Answer 1

• Output Hypothesis (+Input important) for production
• Contrastive Analysis, Error analysis, Interlanguage
• Contrastive Analysis and conditionals (Arabic)
• frequency and lexical acquisition (longitudinal study shows that advances speakers/learners actually use more frequent words)

Question 2

Which main claims do your articles in Phonetics Phonology make?

Answer 2

sociolinguistic effects in usage of loan words

• Exemplar Theory, usage based
• -> linguistic knowledge is built up by representing in memory previously encountered speech with detailed phonetic info (= exemplars) [penguin example]
• -> similar Exemplars then grouped together as categories
• -> activating category and choosing exemplar
• -> reference to Labov and Eckert (Cultural Image,
• the claim is that NZE two Exemplars of /r/ are stored and that imported structure associated to social category ‘Maori’
• -> selection depends on topics in speech and speakers association and words association with the source lg and it’s culture

_____

Speech perception and phonology

1) phonology (of L1) influences perception
- learning phonology of a lg involves adjusting expectations from L1
- due to fine-tuning of perceptual System to expect input of a certain type
- phonemic categories and phonotactic restrictions of L1 influence adaptation of words borrowed from other lgs (loan words)

2) ALSO influence from perception to phonology : Language Change
–> Over historical time, lgs change to eliminate difficult-to-perceive contests
Mechanisms:
- neutralizing
- making them distinct
Why?
–> this being being effect of misperceptions
–> or perhaps through cognitive bias, to minimize misperceptions

______

Pitch contour matching, interactional alignment across turns

• preciously pitch movement patterns associated with specific functions (but high variability!)
• claim here:
  – speakers orient to prosodic features used by previous talkers (matching, non-matching)
  – interactional function: showing agreement or ‘disagreement’
  – aligning tone when listener wants speaker to continue, non-alignment if not
  _____

Lexical characteristics of words and phonological awareness skills of preschool kids
- LRM: Lexical Restructuring Model
–> proposed that as children’s mental lexicon grows, their mental representations of words shifts from holistic nature to fine-grained and segmented nature; basically:
first they have mental representation of a word as a whole, later increasingly segmental representation (phonemes)
–> lexical characteristics: word frequency, age of acquisition, phonological neighborhood density and phonotactic probably
Claim:
Phonological awareness increases greater with
- high frequency words (not proven)
- if phonological neighborhood density increased (not proven)
- for earlier acquired words than later
- as phonotactic probability increases
–> and each variable would interact with age and vocab knowledge

1- Phonological probability: increased exposure helps contrast/distinguish
2- Age of Acqu: awareness skills decreased with age of ac - less time to restructuring
3- frequency: not consistent w/ predictions (depends on task?), but was ok for you get children
4- neighborhood density: not consistent,

Question 3

What is the perceptual assimilation model?

Answer 3

When learning L2 can’t hear differences, actually the listener tends to assimilate the foreign sound to sounds they already know.

Also on suprasegmental lvl, syllable structure, phonotactics.
E.g. non-tonal lg speakers have difficulties hearing tonal differences, as in Chinese for example

Question 4

What is the exemplar theory?

Answer 4

similar to prototype theory.

The two theories are similar in that they emphasize the importance of similarity in categorization: only by resembling a prototype or exemplar can a new stimulus be placed into a category. They also both rely on the same general cognitive process: we experience a new stimulus, a concept in memory is triggered, we make a judgment of resemblance, and draw a categorization conclusion. However, the specifics of the two theories are different.

However this theory describes categorization process through the comparison of a new item/stimuli with instances already stored in memory, i.e. to all examples of a certain category, the examples being all experiences that one has had with said category.
The instance stored in memory is the “exemplar”. The new stimulus is assigned to a category based on the greatest number of similarities it holds with exemplars in that category. For example, the model proposes that people create the “bird” category by maintaining in their memory a collection of all the birds they have experienced: sparrows, robins, ostriches, penguins, etc. If a new stimulus is similar enough to some of these stored bird examples, the person categorizes the stimulus in the “bird” category.

Question 5

Reasons for errors (Error Analysis)

Answer 5

either:
Interlingual (L1 influence)

or Intralingual (learner’s false hypothesis) including:

a. Learning strategy-based errors
i. false analogy
ii. misanalysis
iii. incomplete rule application
iv. exploiting redundancy
v. overlooking restrictions
vi. hypercorrection
vii. overgeneralisation

b. Communication strategy-based errors
i. holistic
ii. analytic

c. Induced errors
i. material-based
ii. teacher-talk
iii. exercise-based
iv. look-up error
v. errors induced by pedagogical priority

Question 6

Which teaching approaches are there depending on theory?

Answer 6

behaviorist:
- drill patterns, repetition
—> audio-lingual

generativst:
—> input?

functionalist:
- communication leads to making new connections
- task-based lg learning (meaningful tasks using target lg)
—> communicative lg teaching