Doctoral Degrees (General Linguistics)

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Browsing Doctoral Degrees (General Linguistics) by Author "Berghoff, Robyn"

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    Syntactic processing in English–Afrikaans bilinguals
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2020-03) Berghoff, Robyn; Bylund, Emanuel; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of General Linguistics.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: A fundamental question in the study of human language is why, compared to the acquisition of a first language (L1), second language (L2) acquisition should have such widely varying outcomes. Relatedly, there is a question regarding the upper limits on L2 acquisition, namely whether it is possible for learners who have not acquired a language from birth to perform identically to native speakers of that language. Experimental psycholinguistic techniques offer insight into the moment-by-moment processes involved in language comprehension and production, and in recent years have increasingly been employed to investigate L2 and bilingual processing, both in their own right and in relation to L1 processing. In this dissertation, such techniques are employed to investigate L2 English syntactic processing among early L2 acquirers (L1 Afrikaans) who receive extensive naturalistic exposure to the L2 and have attained high proficiency therein. Second language populations with this combination of features, each of which has been shown to affect processing outcomes, are understudied in the literature, as are highly linguistically diverse settings such as South Africa. There is thus little information available regarding the consequences of this particular constellation of individual- and environmental-level characteristics on ultimate levels of L2 attainment. The studies presented in the dissertation focus on three syntactic phenomena that have been shown to be processed in a non-nativelike fashion by L2 speakers. These are temporarily ambiguous or so-called garden-path sentences, pronouns, and long-distance wh-dependencies. The techniques of self-paced reading and eye-tracking-while-reading were utilized to obtain real-time processing data. These data were supplemented by measures of L2 proficiency and language background. First-language speakers of South African English were employed as a comparison group. The findings show L1–L2 convergence for a subset of the L2 participants – those with a relatively earlier age of L2 acquisition – in the garden-path sentence processing experiment. In the pronoun resolution experiment, evidence of cross-linguistic influence at the verb level is observed, which subsequently affects processing at the sentence level. Finally, in the processing of long-distance wh-dependencies, the strategies employed by the L1 and L2 speakers differ, with awareness of an abstract syntactic cue being evident in the L1 but not the L2 speakers. The results provide insight into the implications of the South African language acquisition and use contexts for L2 development. A more general consideration of these implications as they relate to other multilingual settings contributes to our knowledge of L2 attainment in linguistically heterogeneous environments.