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Accepted manuscript, to appeared in Applied Psycholinguistics: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/applied-psycholinguistics. Herein, we contextualize, problematize and offer some insights for moving beyond the problem of monolingual comparative normativity in (psycho)linguistic research on bilingualism. We argue that, in the vast majority of cases, juxtaposing (functional) monolinguals to bilinguals fails to offer what the comparison is supposedly intended to do: meet the standards of empirical control in line with the scientific method. Instead, the default nature of monolingual comparative normativity has historically contributed to inequalities in many facets of bilingualism research and continues to impede progress on multiple levels. Beyond framing our views on the matter, we offer some epistemological considerations and methodological alternatives to this standard practice that improve empirical rigor while fostering increased diversity, inclusivity and equity in our field.

Standard varieties are often perceived as morally superior compared with nonstandard varieties (Hill 2008). Consequently, these differences lead to ideologies that racialize nonstandard varieties (Rosa 2016), and increase the negative stereotypes towards nonstandard varieties (Giles and Watson 2013). One outlet of such stereotypes can be observed with speech intelligibility and accentedness judgements. This study examines whether seeing a White or a South Asian face impacts listeners’ perception of American, British, and Indian English and to what extent listeners’ social network diversity plays a role in predicting their perception of speech. Results indicated that intelligibility scores decreased and accentedness judgements increased for all varieties when speech was paired with South Asian faces. However, listeners with less racially diverse social networks had the highest accentedness judgements. Understanding how to account for the emergence and behavioral implications of different English varieties is a pressing question, and these results shed light on how English varieties are perceived. The implications will be discussed in light of language teaching, linguistic practices, and language research.

In the following, I will briefly outline how Krashen's Input Hypothesis, Acquisition/Learning distinction, and the Natural Order Hypothesis hold up when seen through the lens of usage‐ based approaches. A number of frameworks fall under the umbrella label of usage‐based approaches, including cognitive‐functional linguistics (Evans et al., 2007), usage‐based construction grammar (Goldberg, 2006, 2019), and dynamic systems theory (de Bot et al., 2007). As diverse as these frameworks are in terms of the questions they focus on and the methods they employ, they are united in their commitment to two fundamental assumptions about language and language acquisition: First, that the primary impetus of language acquisition is the learner's exposure to usage events, that is, their communicative experience using their second language; and second, that the cognitive mechanisms that learners employ are not exclusive to language learning, but the same ones at work in any kind of learning (Ellis & Wulff, 2020).

This study examines the variable positioning of a finite adverbial subordinate clause and its main clause with the subordinate clause either preceding or following the main clause in native versus nonnative English. Specifically, we contrast causal, concessive, conditional, and temporal adverbial clauses produced by German and Chinese learners of English with those produced by native speakers. We examined 2,362 attestations from the Chinese and German subsections of the International Corpus of Learner English (Granger, Dagneaux, Meunier, & Paquot, 2009) and from the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (Granger, 1998). All instances were annotated for the ordering, the subordinate clause type, the lengths of the main and subordinate clauses, the first language of the speakers, the conjunction used, and the file it originated from (as a proxy for the speaker producing the sentence so as to be able to study individual and lexical variation). The results of a two-step regression modeling protocol suggest that learners behave most nativelike with causal clauses and struggle most with conditional and concessive clauses; in addition, learners make more non-nativelike choices when the main and subordinate clause are of about equal length.

Upon hearing someone’s speech, a listener can access information such as the speaker’s age, gender identity, socioeconomic status, and their linguistic background. However, an open question is whether living in different locales modulates how listeners use these factors to assess speakers’ speech. Here, an audio-visual test was used to measure whether listeners’ accentedness judgments and intelligibility (i.e., speech perception) can be modulated depending on racial information in faces that they see. American, British, and Indian English were used as three different English varieties of speech. These speech samples were presented with either a white female face or a South Asian female face. Two experiments were completed in two locales: Gainesville, Florida (USA) and Montreal, Quebec (Canada). Overall, Montreal listeners were more accurate in their transcription of sentences (i.e., intelligibility) compared to Gainesville listeners. Moreover, Gainesville listeners’ ability to transcribe the same spoken sentences decreased for all varieties when listening to speech paired with South Asian faces. However, seeing a white or a South Asian face did not impact speech intelligibility for the same spoken sentences for Montreal listeners. Finally, listeners’ accentedness judgments increased for American English and Indian English when the visual information changed from a white face to a South Asian face in Gainesville, but not in Montreal. These findings suggest that visual cues for race impact speech perception to a greater degree in locales with greater ecological diversity.

Standard varieties are often perceived as morally superior compared to nonstandard varieties (Hill 2008). Consequently, these differences lead to ideologies that racialize nonstandard varieties (Rosa 2016), and increase the negative stereotypes towards nonstandard varieties (Giles & Watson 2013). One outlet of such stereotypes can be observed with speech intelligibility and accentedness judgments. This study examines whether seeing a white or a South Asian face impacts listeners’ perception of American, British, Indian English and to what extent listeners’ social network diversity plays a role in predicting their perception of speech. Results indicated that intelligibility scores decreased and accentedness judgments increased for all varieties when speech was paired with South Asian faces. However, listeners with less racially diverse social networks had the highest accentedness judgments. Understanding how to account for the emergence and behavioral implications of different English varieties is a pressing question, and these results shed light on how English varieties are perceived. The implications will be discussed in light of language teaching, linguistic practices, and language research.

We investigate the cross-linguistic influence and the (longitudinal) impact of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) on the acquisition of intensifying constructions, using corpora of written French, Dutch, and English productions by L1 speakers, and L2 English and L2 Dutch produced by French-speaking learners in CLIL and traditional foreign language education. We hypothesize that learners will benefit from similarities between the L1 and target language (TL) intensifying constructions, and secondly, that more input and use (through CLIL) will lead to a more target-like use of intensifying constructions. The analyses include quantitative measures of frequency and productivity, and covarying analyses (Gries, 2007). Our findings suggest that, as expected, CLIL students produce intensifying constructions in a more target-like manner. The effect of the duration of TL learning, however, is more apparent in English than in Dutch.

Various approaches to second language (L2) acquisition can be labeled as “usage-based.” Connectionism is one strand of research in L2 acquisition that seeks to investigate how simple associative learning mechanisms such as the kind of contingency analysis mentioned earlier meets the complex language evidence available to a learner in their input and output. Children learning their native language only acquire the meanings of temporal adverbs quite late in development. Under normal first language circumstances, usage optimally tunes the language system to the input; under these circumstances of low salience of L2 form and blocking, however, all the extra input in the world can sum to nothing, with interlanguage sometimes being described as having “fossilized”. The effect of a learner’s L1 is no longer considered the exclusive determinant of L2 acquisition as proposed in the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis.

This chapter provides an overview of usage-based research on the acquisition of formulaic language. A definition of construction that includes formulaic sequences as defined in usage-based linguistics is outlined, followed by a description of the input properties that impact the learnability of (formulaic) constructions: distribution, recency, salience, prototypicality, and contingency. Studies testing learners’ constructional knowledge as well as studies examining the role of formulaic constructions in the acquisition process are summarized, and the chapter closes with some suggestions for future research directions.

Corpus linguists are increasingly interested in applying their methodological tool box to the various areas of multilingualism. This paper gives an overview of corpus resources and presents three case studies on L2 foreign language learning that employ quantitative methods. The goal is to demonstrate that corpus-linguistic approaches further our understanding of many hot topics in learner language research, including appropriate characterizations of the L1 input and/or target norm; the adequate modeling of the intrinsically complex and highly L1-specific nature of learner language; and the increasingly recognized role of individual variation in the acquisition process. The paper closes with a brief discussion of how these methods can and should be applied to other areas of multilingualism research.

This study presents a contrastive analysis of 3624 instances of prenominal adjective order retrieved from the Chinese and German sections of the International Corpus of Learner English and the International Corpus of English. The data was annotated for nine determinants of adjective order, including semantic, frequency-related, and articulatory features. Applying a two-step regression procedure called MuPDAR (Multifactorial Prediction and Deviation Analysis Using Regressions), the present study finds that overall, the intermediate-advanced level learners are well-aligned with native speakers’ preferences. However, we also see that while the German learners seem generally better aligned with regard to frequency-related factors, the Chinese learners behave more target-like with regard to the effect of adjective gradability, and they seem more sensitive to segmental alternation constraints. In discussing these and other results, the study hopes to illustrate how corpus-based methods can make a valuable contribution to contemporary SLA research, specifically with regard to multifactorially determined phenomena such as adjective order.

The decision to follow the demonstrative this with a noun phrase is important to students’ writing development. Previous research has emphasized when students should not attend this rather than studying why students make the choice. Using a corpus-linguistic approach, we investigated 1,999 instances of (un)attended this in student technical and academic writing. High shares of unattended this were found in both text types as well as in original and revised drafts.

This paper exemplifies an approach to learner corpus data that adopts a multifactorial definition of ‘context’. We apply a logistic regression to 2,986 attestations of genitive alternation (the squirrel’s nest vs. the nest of the squirrel) from the Chinese and German sub-sections of the International Corpus of Learner English and the British component of the International Corpus of English that were coded for 12 factors. Importantly, the speakers’ L1 was included as a predictor to be able to compare properly the native speakers with the learners as well as the two learner groups with each other. The final regression model predicts all speakers’ genitive choices very accurately (> 93%) and suggests that (i) the learners rely heavily on processing-related factors, which can be overridden by semantic constraints, and (ii) learners’ choices are differentially modulated by their L1. We close with a discussion of how this context-based, multifactorial approach goes beyond traditional learner corpus research.

Seventy-eight native English speakers rated the foreign-accented speech (FAS) of 24 international students enrolled in an Intensive English programme at a public university in Texas on degree of accent, comprehensibility and communicative ability. Variables considered to potentially impact listeners' ratings were the sex of the speaker, the first language family of the speaker (Asian, Hispanic and Middle-Eastern students participated), the speaker's proficiency level (students were enrolled in low-, intermediate- and advanced-proficiency courses) and listeners' self-reported familiarity (low, medium or high) with FAS. The results of a multifactorial ANOVA and Tukey's pairwise comparisons of means suggest that all variables significantly correlate with listeners' judgements in all three rating areas, which lend further support to previous research. More importantly, the present multifactorial ANOVA identified significant interactions of all variables; this indicates that listeners' perception of FAS, rathe...

This Special Collection includes a number of articles published together on the topic of Psycholinguistics and Variation and identified by the keyword “PsychLingVar” The collection reflects our view that variation in language processing is both important and ubiquitous, and that such variation presents challenges that psycholinguists have long ignored. In this article, we provide a brief overview of current psycholinguistic research on variation, including the articles featured in the collection. While quite diverse, this collection of articles is united by the common goal of investigating variation in language processing.

This study presents a contrastive analysis of gerundial and infinitival complementation produced by Spanish and German ESL learners and English native speakers. An analysis of more than 1,100 attestations of the target constructions obtained from the International Corpus of Learner English reveals that (i) advanced learners’ construction choices are not necessarily ungrammatical, yet often non-idiomatic, and (ii) German learners are overall more attuned to native-like choices than Spanish learners. A preliminary case study suggests that Spanish ESL teaching materials may benefit from incorporating results of corpus-based analyses of authentic language such as the present one. The present study seeks to close the gap between learner language research and ESL teaching materials, and to raise awareness about the gradual nature of second language proficiency.

This paper addresses the question of what governs the optional attendance of the determiner this by a noun phrase in academic student writing. Previous research on this has largely focused on the noun phrases accompanying this, while the question of what determines writers' choice between attended and unattended this in the first place has received only little attention. In the present study, we present the results of a more comprehensive analysis, including quantitative methods (logistic regression analysis, Distinctive Collexeme Analysis, textual distribution measures) and qualitative methods (cluster extraction), of more than 5,800 hits of sentence-initial this obtained from the Michigan Corpus of Upper Level Student Papers (MICUSP). Overall, the results point to a strong influence of the verb accompanying (un)attended this, which is moderated to some extent by author-related variables like academic discipline, academic proficiency level, native speaker status, and gender. A qualitative pattern analysis of the most prominent this + verb clusters reveals that semantic biases evidenced in the verbs distinctively associated with (un)attended this are reflected at the text-organizational level in terms of positional preferences within paragraphs and texts. In combination, the results point towards an ongoing delexicalization of this + verb clusters like this is and this means into textual organization markers, which stands in sharp contrast to traditional cautions against unattended this as mere “vague reference” that is to be avoided.

Based on explorations of the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP), the present paper provides an introduction to the central techniques in corpus analysis, including the creation and examination of word lists, keyword lists, concordances, and cluster lists. It also presents a MICUSP-based case study of the demonstrative pronoun this and the distribution and use of its attended and unattended forms in different disciplinary subsets of the corpus. The paper aims to demonstrate how corpus linguistics and corpus methods can contribute to writing research and provide fruitful insights into student academic writing.

In Construction Grammar, highly frequent syntactic configurations are assumed to be stored as symbolic units in the mental lexicon alongside words. Considering the example of gerund and infinitival complement constructions in English (She tried rocking the baby vs. She tried to rock the baby), this study combines corpus-linguistic and experimental evidence to investigate the question whether these patterns are also stored as constructions by German foreign language learners of English. In a corpus analysis based on 3,343 instances of the two constructions from the British component of the International Corpus of English, a distinctive collexeme analysis was computed to identify the verbs that distinguish best between the two constructions; these verbs were used as experimental stimuli in a sentence completion experiment and a sentence acceptability rating experiment. Two kinds of short-distance priming effects were investigated in the completion data: we checked how often subjects produced an ing-/to-/’other’-construction after having rated an ing- or to-construction (rating-to-production priming), and how often they produced an ing-/to-/’other’-construction when they had produced and ing- or to-construction in the directly preceding completion (production-to-production priming). Furthermore, we considered the proportion of to-completions before a completion in the questionnaire as a measure of a within-subject accumulative priming effect. We found no rating-to-production priming effects in the expected direction, but a weak effect in the opposite direction; short-distance production-to-production priming effects from ing to ing and from ‘other’ and to to to, and, on the whole at least, a suggestive accumulative production-to-production priming effect for both constructions. In the rating task, we found that subjects rate sentences better when the sentential structure is compatible with the main verb’s collexemic distinctiveness.

The aspect hypothesis ( Andersen & Shirai, 1994 ) proposes that language learners are initially influenced by the inherent semantic aspect in the acquisition of tense and aspect (TA) morphology. Perfective past emerges earlier with accomplishments and achievements and progressive with activities. Although this hypothesis has been extensively studied, there have been no analyses of the frequency, form, and function of relevant types and tokens in the input. This article reports the results of 2 corpus-based studies investigating how various features of the input—frequency distributions, reliabilities of form–function mapping, and prototypicality of lexical aspect—affect TA morphology. Study I determined the relative frequency profiles of exemplars of English TA and employed various statistics to determine the associations between particular verb–aspect combinations. Study II expanded the aspect hypothesis, examining whether native speakers judge the most frequent forms in isolation to be more prototypical in lexical aspect. Analyses were then matched against acquisition data for different TA patterns by adult learners of English ( Bardovi-Harlig, 2000 ) to determine whether the verbs' acquisition order is determined by their frequency, form, and function in the input. Rather than testifying to the effect of 1 factor alone, the results suggest that frequency, distinctiveness, and prototypicality jointly drive acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the John Swales Conference Corpus (JSCC), which contains the lectures and discussion sessions from an applied linguistics conference held in 2006 at the University of Michigan. This corpus constitutes a useful resource in that it provides insights into the language of a narrowly defined academic community. Moreover, it spans the entire series of conference presentations rather than just snippets, so it licenses the investigation of inter-textual links, semiotic spanning, and related co-textual phenomena. After a brief outline of the properties of the JSCC and a review of the relevant literature, we present three exploratory case studies, with a particular focus on the discussion sections. First, some major phraseological differences between the presentations and the discussion sections are identified. The second case study, focusing on the chairs’ utterances, uncovers a high degree of regularity, especially with regard to opening remarks, and the chairs’ attempts to downplay the authoritative role that they have been assigned. The third case study rounds off our exploratory analyses of the JSCC with a closer examination of the different causes of laughter in the discussion sections, which underscore how the language of discussion sections in a specialized conference is heavily influenced by shared professional knowledge and personal relationships among the participants.

In Construction Grammar, the ultimate grammatical unit is the construction, a conventionalized form-meaning pairing. We present interrelated evidence from three different methods, all of which speak in favor of attributing an ontological status to constructions for non-native speakers of English. Firstly, in a sentence-fragment completion study with German learners of English, we obtained a significant priming effect between constructions. Secondly, these priming effects correlate strongly with the verb-construction preferences in native speaker corpora: verbs which are strongly associated with one construction resist priming to another semantically compatible construction; more importantly, the priming effects do not correlate with verb-construction preferences from German translation equivalents, ruling out a translational explanation. Thirdly, in order to rule out an alternative account in terms of syntactic rather than constructional priming, we present semantic evidence obtained by a sorting study, showing that subjects exhibited a strong tendency towards a construction-based sorting, which even reflects recent explanations of how constructions are related.

This paper is concerned with the question of which factors govern prenominal adjective order (AO) in English. In particular, the analysis aims to overcome shortfalls of previous analyses by, firstly, adopting a multifactorial approach integrating all variables postulated in the literature, thereby doing justice to the well-established fact that cognitive and psychological processes are multivariate and complex. Secondly, the phenomenon is investigated on the basis of a large corpus, rendering the results obtained more representative and valid of naturally occurring language than those of previous studies. To this end, corpus-linguistic operationalizations of phonological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic determinants of AO are devised and entered into a Linear Discriminant Analysis, which determines the relative influence of all variables (semantic variables being most important) and yields a classification accuracy of 78%. Moreover, by means of the operationalizations developed in this analysis, the ordering of yet unanalyzed adjective strings can be predicted with about equal accuracy (73.5%).

This chapter presents a constructionist analysis of words and idioms. It provides a summary of early constructionist research that argued in favor of viewing idioms not as anomalies, and addresses the problem of how the degree of semantic and syntactic irregularity of different constructions can be measured quantitatively. The chapter proposes a quantitative measure that numerically expresses this degree of semantic similarity and which can be considered a numerical measure of compositionality.