Why do we need a native speaker control group in second language acquisition studies? Event
- Time:
- 13:00 - 13:40
- Date:
- 26 April 2023
- Venue:
- on line
Event details
Confucius Institute Lunchtime webinar
Asbract from Prof Roumyana Slabakova:
There is a current debate, reflected in a recent special issue of Frontiers in Psychology, about native speaker (NS) judgments and their role in second language acquisition (SLA) studies. A lot of SLA scholars consider it inappropriate to compare NSs and L2 learners, since the former are monolingual and should not be compared to bilinguals. However, testing NSs remains important for the purposes of validating our linguistic assumptions and test instruments. I will present an experimental study on L2 Mandarin, in which testing a good number of NSs has proved crucial for validating true native interpretations. The property under discussion is the interpretation of null elements and overt pronouns in Mandarin resultative constructions. I will also describe the learner results, which pattern nicely with the control group.
Speaker information
Professor Roumyana Slabakova,is Head of Research of the Languages Cultures and Linguistics department. Professor Slabakova has published over seventy articles in first-tier scholarly journals and thirty chapters; she has written four monographs and edited three volumes. She is the co-Editor of the journal Second Language Research (SAGE) and of the book series Language Acquisition and Linguistic Disorders (John Benjamins). She sits on numerous scientific advisory boards and is a foreign member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.