How classifiers facilitate predictive processing in L1 and L2 Chinese: the role of semantic and grammatical cues (Grüter et al., 2020)
Citation
Grüter, T., Lau, E., & Ling, W. (2020). How classifiers facilitate predictive processing in L1 and L2 Chinese: The role of semantic and grammatical cues. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 35(2), 221-234.
My thoughts
Classifier + noun has dual information (semantics + grammatical), for example, the classifier tiao is associated with nouns that conform to the description of a slender, long-shaped thing, often flexible. Both rope and dog are members of the tiao class, but the rope is more straightforwardly fits the semantic criteria associated with the class, which means the sematnics associated with tiaos is predictive of rope to a greater degree than dog, and if the predictions are based purely on form class membership, then tiao should be equally predictive of both.
How about interaction between the Chinese classifier and the animacy of the noun (+animate +human, +animate -human, and -animate noun), if noun animacy plays a greater role in Chinese?
Maybe it’s an animacy difference, if both dog and rope are in the same membership of the classifier ‘tiao’, which takes both animate and inanimate nouns, but for classifiers such as kuai, only takes inanimate nouns, and for classifiers such as zhi, only takes +animate -human nouns?
Backgorund
- Cue competition is at the heart of the Competition Model (Bates & MacWhinney, 1989), which posits that a key aspect of learning a language lies in determining the relative importance of different morphosyntactic and semantic cues to sentence interpretation. In English, word order tends to be the most reliable cue, in Spanish, subject-verb agreement tends to be more informative, and in Chinese, noun animacy plays a greater role.
- L2 learners tend to over-rely on cues that have high reliability and validity in their L1.
- Classifiers = measure words, are free morphemes marking the class of the noun they co-occur with.
- Sortal Classifiers = categorise nouns into classes broadly based on inherent properties, such as shape, natural kind, and function.
- Classifier + noun has dual information (semantics + grammatical)
- tiao is associated with nouns that conform to the description of a slender, long-shaped thing, often flexible.
- Both rope and dog are members of the tiao class, but the rope is more straightforwardly fits the semantic criteria associated with the class, which means the sematnics associated with tiaos is predictive of rope to a greater degree than dog, and if the predictions are based purely on form class membership, then tiao should be equally predictive of both.
- L1 Mandarin speakers were faster to look at the target object when it was named, preceded by an informative classifier, such as the classifier compatible only with the target noun in the visual scene.
- Native Chinese speakers derive similar processing benefits from prenominal classifiers as native Spanish speakers do from gender-marked determiners.
Hypothesis
This study examines the long-standing claims that L2 learners rely more on non-grammatical cues than on grammatical cues during sentence processing compared to native speakers. Research questions:
- Do L1 and L2 listners differ in their use of grammatical form-class information vs. semantics encoded by classifiers to predict an upcoming noun?
- L2 learners tend to rely more heavily on semantics than on grammatical information, and we predict that reliance on semantic vs. form-class information will be greater among L2 than among L1 listeners.
Method
Pariticpants
- 96 in total, 38 native, 58 non-native speakers of Chinese
Suvery Visual world paradigm
Tests
Visual world paradigm: which one is the dog? 哪一条是狗？ three sortal classifiers
- 条
- 支
- 张 12 target nouns based on the non-prototypical memebers of thie classifer class
Results
Results show that L2 listeners experienced greater competition than L1 listeners from nouns that were grammatically incompatible with the classifier they heard but shared semantic features associated with it. The greater reliance on semantic cues observed in L2 processing is argued to be an effect of adaptation to the relative reliability of information.