The Learnability of Complex Constructions: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective

Description

How language users from different linguistic backgrounds cope with forms of complexity is still a territory with many unanswered questions. The current book is concerned with morphologically and syntactically complex items, that is, derivatives, inflected forms, compounds, phrases and forms related by agreement and examines how these constructions are acquired and learned in a great range of different languages, such as Turkish, Welsh, Basque and Catalan. Relying on a variety of methodologies targeting production or comprehension, among others, lexical decision and priming experiments, an EEG study, a corpus analysis and a reading test, the authors consider data from native speakers mastering one or more languages and second-language users. Overall, the volume reflects upon and contributes to our understanding of how the pecularities of language and its users affect the learnability of complex forms. Contents Introduction Lexical co-activation with prefixed cognates and non-cognates: Evidence from cross-script masked priming Differences in acoustic detail: The realization of syncretic nouns in German Does the processing of first language compounds change in late bilinguals? Planning complex structures in a second language: Compounds and phrases in non-native speech production The learnability of English intensifying constructions in French-speaking learners: Receptive versus productive competence Is it hard to learn multiple word orders? The learnability of gender agreement in Spanish bilinguals Agreement mismatches in the Spanish preterite of Catalan-dominant bilinguals in Majorca: A receding interlanguage phenomenon Index