大学共同利用機関法人 人間文化研究機構 国立国語研究所

• 国立国語研究所 多目的室 (東京都立川市緑町10-2) 　交通案内
• オンライン (Web会議サービスの「Zoom」を使用)
  

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講演は英語で行います

• Ozernyi, D. M. (2021). "L1 vs. L2 vs. L3 transfer: Evidence contra wholesale transfer models and privileged languages from grammatical gender and definiteness acquisition in sequential quadrilinguals." Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, 6(1), 9-23.
  https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v6i1.4891
• Ozernyi, D. M. (2022). "Some remarks on the history of transfer in language studies." Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, 7(1), 5206.
  https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v7i1.5206
• DM Ozernyi, Haeun Kim, Suzanne Flynn, Taichi Yamashita (forthcoming) "On the interaction of language testing and language acquisition." Applied Linguistics. Oxford University Press. (summative of materials at the colloquium at AAAL 2023)

The field of language acquisition, and third language acquisition specifically, has seen an incredible surge in recent decades. The most salient witness of this is the sheer number of models of L3 acquisition which has appeared – around 13 of them, and counting (see a taxonomy in Ozernyi 2021a). In this talk, I would like to examine several issues surrounding this recent surge. The central question, however, is as follows: what constitutes (or, rather, should constitute) a rigorous investigation of Ln acquisition?, i.e. what requirements these acquisition studies should fulfill methodologically, &c.?

Importantly, I confine the discussion of acquisition studies to generative tradition, leaving out, e.g., functionalist and other traditions (as in the work of de Bot, Goldberg, Slobin, Givon, and others). I also leave out the contrastive analysis framework – chiefly for reasons given in Ozernyi (2022c, §1). However, acquisition studies are inevitably and invariably a multidisciplinary endeavor and require interaction with theoretical and applied linguistics.

Trivially, an L3 study consists, minimally, of delineating the following:
(1) the language property, acquisition of which is being studied (e.g., “pro-drop”, “telicity”, &c.),
(2) which aspect of acquisition theory is being studied (e.g., s.-c. “initial state” vs “development”),
(3) developing appropriate experimental tools (e.g., acceptability judgment tasks, elicited imitation tasks),
(4) selecting the appropriate assessment tools to place students on the proficiency continuum;
(5) selecting the appropriate statistical tools for analysis (e.g., lmer, anovas, simple regression).

My objective is to examine the problematicity of these requirements in recent studies. I.e., I aim to argue that because a lot of studies fail one or more elements of this five-element list, we are not much further in our understanding of the acquisition process than Epstein, Flynn, and Martohardjono (1996) – ostensibly, despite the surge in the number of studies. Specifically, I want to draw attention to the following three issues (respective of the elements above):
(apropos 1) Acquisition research is heavily and austerely constrained by state of art in syntax and adjacent fields depending on the acquisition of what is being investigated.
(apropos 2) Despite a sizeable body of work, theories of “initial state” (such as in the work of, e.g., Rothman and colleagues) fail both falsifiability and internal coherency requirements (Ozernyi 2022b).
(apropos 4) Vast lack of assessment literacy can (and does, widely so) render research uninterpretable (following Ozernyi, Flynn, Kim, and Yamashita, forthcoming). How to deal with the assessment of less-commonly taught languages?

Lastly, I intend to briefly extend the sketches of a new model of Ln acquisition given in some recent work (Ozernyi, 2022c, §2; Ozernyi and Chou, 2023; Ozernyi and Chou, submitted, &c.), theory of the intermediate, showing how it answers the challenges outlined above.

References
Epstein, S. D., Flynn, S., & Martohardjono, G. (1996). Second language acquisition: Theoretical and experimental issues in contemporary research. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 19(4), 677-714.
Ozernyi, DM. (2022a). On meronomy and dimensionality of the models for multilingual language acquisition. UNC-CH Spring Colloquium.
http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.18245.32489
Ozernyi, DM. (2022b). On initial state, initial stages, other fantastic beasts, and where to find them. UC Berkeley.
http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.24159.94886
Ozernyi, D. M. (2022). Some remarks on the history of transfer in language studies. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, 7(1), 5206.
https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v7i1.5206
Ozernyi, D. M. (荀湖賢), Chou, Karen C. (周翠群) (2023)「Asymmetrical processing of Cantonese 嗰- clauses in context of language attrition (an exploratory study)」第六屆粵語語言學論壇 // 6th Forum on Cantonese Linguistics. June 2023. Hong Kong University.
https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.36609.43366
Ozernyi D.M. and Chou K.C. (submitted) Processing of Cantonese 畀咗-- vs.將/畀咗-- constructions in context of language attrition.