Schooling and language usage matter in heritage bilingual processing: Sortal classifiers in Mandarin (Hao et al., 2024)
Citation
Hao, J., Kubota, M., Bayram, F., González Alonso, J., Grüter, T., Li, M., & Rothman, J. (2024). Schooling and language usage matter in heritage bilingual processing: Sortal classifiers in Mandarin. Second Language Research, 02676583241270900.
My thoughts
Found HSs are like L1 groups in Grüter et al., 2020’s paper.
Past research found that, Mandarin L1-dominant adults have facilitated processing (look at the target faster) if the stimuli had a classifier compared to without a classifier. Overall, they found that heritage speakers (HSs) predictively used classifiers during sentence processing, with a preference for grammatical cues (match or mismatch between classifiers and nouns) over semantic cues (whether or not the noun is prototypically associated with the classifier, e.g., “dog” vs. “rope” with the classifier ‘tiao’, which is usually associated with long and flexible objects). They also found individual differences among the HSs—for example, greater exposure to Mandarin and higher literacy levels were associated with an increased probability of relying more on semantic cues.
I found the association between grammatical and semantic features in the paper to be somewhat unclear and, at times, seemingly casual. For example, the notion that G+ (grammatical) aligns with prototypical semantic features of a classifier (S+) raises some questions. While the example of ‘tiao’ (associated with objects that are long, slender, and flexible) is sensible in prototypical cases, such as ‘rope’, it becomes less convincing in other contexts. For instance, cats are arguably long, slender, and flexible, yet we don’t refer to a cat as Number + Classifier + Cat ‘一条猫’. This discrepancy suggests that the semantic association is not always straightforward or consistent.
G+S+ 一条绳子 vs 一条狗 = competitor objects match with target classifier in both grammatical and semantic features G-S+ 一条手表 vs 一条狗 = competitor objects that matched with the target classifier in semantic features but not in grammatical form class G-S- 一条苹果 vs 一条狗 = competitor objects that neither matched with the target classifier in semantic features, but not in grammatical form class
Backgorund
Huettig et al. (2010) found that Mandarin-speaking L1-dominant adults in a visual world eye-tracking study showed that linguistic stimuli that had a classifier compatible with the target noun in the visual scene facilitated processing lookedk at the target faster) relative to linguistic stimuli without a classifier. Li et al. (2021) employed EEG to investigate the processing of isolated classifier-noun pairs in adult Mandarin-speaking L1-dominant speakers and Mandarin heritage speakers (HSs) residing in Malaysia. They found that HSs used classifiers to predict and integrate the upcoming nouns to the same extent as the L1-dominant speakers. A larger N400 effect was found in classifier-noun mismatch than in classifier-noun match. Gruter et al. (2020) found that for both L1 and L2ers, the G+S+ condition induced more looks to the competitor than the G-S+ condition, and the G-S+ condition induced more competition than the G-S- condition only for the L2ers, which could be the case that L2ers may rely heavily on semantic information. Studies focusing on the production of classifiers in Mandarin HS have shown that several language background factors modulate HS’s performance, including more HL exposure and use (Kan, 2019), a later age of onset of the majority language acquisition (AoA), and having HL schooling.
Hypothesis
If the processing of classifiers is primarily driven by semantic features, objects/nouns that have semantic features associated with that classifier (S+) should receive more looks relative to the ones that do not (S-). G+S+ 一条绳子 vs 一条狗 G-S+ 一条手表 vs 一条狗 G-S- 一条苹果 vs 一条狗
Method
Adopts the method used by Gruter et al. (2020) to examine the processing of Mandarin sortal classifiers in Mandarin adult HSs living in a society where English is the dominant language, and aims to address two research questions:
- At the group level, what are the performance patterns of Mandarin-English HSs on an eye-tracking task examining Mandarin sortal classifiers? What is the status of classifiers as grammatical (-G, +G) and semantic cues (-S, +S) in HSs’ mental grammars and sentence processing?
- How do individual-level bilingual language experience factors modulate HSs’ performances?
Tests
- Visual World Eye-tracking
- LSBQ questionnaire
- Elicited production: 12 classifier and target noun pairs used in the Visual World experiment with 38 fillers. -> to examine whether participants have the item-specific classifier-noun pairing representations of the target classifiers to the target nouns.
- Listening: HSK Level 2
Results
- HSs, the present results suggested that they predictively classify during sentence processing with a preference for grammatical form class cues over and above the semantic cue, when the nouns and classifiers do not match in grammatical form class.
- Found individual differences in HSs.
- A significant difference between G+S+ 一条绳子 and G-S+
- No difference between the G-S+ condition and the G-S- condition
- A significant difference between the G+S+ condition and the G-S- condition
- For the effect of HL schooling, having attended Mandarin language programmes led to greater reliance on semantic information.
- Participants with more HL exposure and use in societal contexts (larger MSU scores) showed increased sensitivity to semantic features, independently of having (or not) had formal training in Mandarin.