Kenanidis Panagiotis, Llompart Miquel, Santos Sara Fernández, Dąbrowska Ewa
Chair of Language and Cognition, Department of English and American Studies, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany.
Department of Translation and Language Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain.
Front Psychol. 2024 May 22;15:1368080. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1368080. eCollection 2024.
Grammatical redundancy is a widespread feature across languages. Although redundant cues can be seen to increase the complexity and processing burden of structures, it has been suggested that they can assist language acquisition. Here, we explored if this learning benefit can be observed from the very initial stages of second language (L2) acquisition and whether the effect of redundancy is modulated by the perceptual salience of the redundant linguistic cues. Across two experiments, three groups of adult native speakers of English were incidentally exposed to three different artificial languages; one that had a fixed word order, Verb-Object-Subject, and two in which thematic role assignment was additionally determined by a low-salient (Experiment 1) or a high-salient (Experiment 2) redundant case marker. While all groups managed to learn the novel language, our results pointed towards a hindering role of redundancy, with participants in the non-redundant condition achieving greater learning outcomes compared to those in both redundant conditions. Results also revealed that this impeding effect of redundancy on L2 learners can be attenuated by the salience of the redundant cue (Experiment 2). In conjunction with earlier findings, the present results suggest that the effect of redundancy on L2 acquisition can be differentially manifested depending on the stage of L2 development, learners' first language biases and age.
语法冗余是一种跨语言的普遍特征。尽管冗余线索会增加结构的复杂性和处理负担，但有人认为它们有助于语言习得。在此，我们探究了在第二语言（L2）习得的最初阶段是否能观察到这种学习益处，以及冗余的影响是否会受到冗余语言线索的感知显著性的调节。在两个实验中，三组以英语为母语的成年受试者偶然接触三种不同的人工语言；一种具有固定的词序，即动词 - 宾语 - 主语，另外两种中，主题角色分配还由一个低显著性（实验1）或高显著性（实验2）的冗余格标记来决定。虽然所有组都成功学会了这门新语言，但我们的结果表明冗余起到了阻碍作用，与两种冗余条件下的受试者相比，非冗余条件下的受试者取得了更好的学习成果。结果还表明，冗余线索的显著性可以减轻冗余对第二语言学习者的这种阻碍作用（实验2）。结合早期研究结果，目前的结果表明，冗余对第二语言习得的影响可能会因第二语言发展阶段、学习者的第一语言偏好和年龄的不同而有所差异。
