The role of statistical learning in the acquisition of motion event construal in a second language

Abstract

Learning to talk about motion in a second language is very difficult because it involves restructuring deeply entrenched patterns from the first language. In this paper we argue that statistical learning can explain why L2 learners are only partially successful in restructuring their second language grammars. We explore to what extent L2 learners make use of two mechanisms of statistical learning, entrenchment and pre-emption to acquire target-like expressions of motion and retreat from overgeneralisation in this domain. Paying attention to the frequency of existing patterns in the input can help learners to adjust the frequency with which they use path and manner verbs in French but is insufficient to acquire the boundary crossing constraint and learn what not to say. We also look at the role of language proficiency and exposure to French in explaining the findings.

Keywords:

• motion event construal
• second language acquisition
• statistical learning
• entrenchment
• pre-emption

Acknowledgement

We are very grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Notes

1. As one reviewer has pointed out, corpus frequencies are often used as a proxy for information about frequencies in the input to L1 or L2 learners, because studying the actual input to each individual L1 or L2 learner would be extremely complex. Of course it is only an assumption that the frequencies in the corpus correspond to those in the input to the learners.

2. As one reviewer points out, it is possible that the lack of statistical significance is due to the lack of statistical power. If more situations with boundary crossings had been studied, the differences could perhaps have become statistically significant.