Chicago under revision

§`z (-ѓ).
Text 2
1. Kewk` saйat on. "ajly bњlme. вart adam kresloda teledidar kњr`p otyr.
2. Teledidar /kranynda щSo§yщ degen 'azu kњr`nd`.
3. Adam teledidar aldynda kreslo-ѓ (-da) otyryp warwady.
4. Adam teledidarйa 'aЉyndad`, ony sњnd`rd`.
5. Sodan kej`n ol ker`l`p, raxattanyp es`ned`.
6. Ol oryndyЉ, іstel, tњsek tАrйan АjyЉtajtyn bњlmege Љaraj kett`.
7. Ol tњsekke 'aЉyndap, 'aЉsyraЉ kњru` іsteld`§ іst`nde tАrйan wamdy 'aЉty.
8. Tњseg`nde otyryp tЂp`wkes`n 'Ђne wАlyйyn wewt`.
9. Sodan kej`n tњsekten tАryp 'ejdes`n wewt`.
10. Ony§ 'ejdes` men walbarynda (-ѓ) oryndyЉta `lul`. Ol pi'amasyn kid`.
11. Sodan kejn adam 'atatyn 'er`n daqrlady, tњsektan (-ten) 'amylйyny aldy.
12. Ol wamdy sњnd`rd`, АjyЉtajtyn bњlme Љara§йy boldy.
13. Ol tњsekke otyrdy.
14. Ol tњsekpen (-te) 'atyp 'astyйyn dАrystady.
15. Kњrpes`n 'amyldy.
16. Ol kњz`n 'Аmyp, АjЉyйa kett`.
17. Ol tњsekte kњrpen`§ astynda Љatty АjyЉtap 'atyr.

1Thomson (2000) questions the extent to which ease of acquisition strictly follows the phrase structure tree in this manner (although it is certainly reasonable to expect that longer distance dependencies would place greater demands on the processor than more local relationships; cf. de Bleser & Luzatti, 1994). This would seem to imply that noun-adjective agreement would be universally more readily acquired than subject-verb person agreement, a doubtful hypothesis for Russian, at least.

2The glosses masculine and feminine are a bit misleading. What is involved is an inflectional class that is always associated with masculine grammatical gender in the pattern exhibited by mal'c&ik, 'boy', and usually associated with grammatically feminine in the pattern exibited by kniga, 'book'.

3We follow standard transliteration practices. The only misleading transcription is y, which transliterates ˚, which in Kazak represents the back unrounded counterpart of the sound represented by Ä (and transliterated u‡), a rounded back vowel commonly said to be intermediate between /o/ and /y/. In following the orthography, we are ignoring rounding harmony, which further increases the number of allomorphs.

4In general, we use the term L2 metalinguistic rather than simply metalinguistic out of a conviction that L2 metalinguistic knowledge is a fundamentally different phenomenon from L1 metalinguistic knowledge. Native speakers of a common L1 are able to intersubjectively identify, categorize, label and refer to their shared linguistic experiences. When talking about a second language, there is no such basis in pre-existing shared experience. The basis of L2 metalinguistic knowledge is not well understood. We suspect that it is founded on analogies with the L1.

5In the case of the so-called historical present, this inflectional form marks forgrounded events (in the sense of Hopper & Thompson, 1981), while as a marker of the so-called present-habitual, it marks backgrounded general facts in third-person narratives. Some of its processing functions are no doubt be related to such discourse properties. The difficulty it poses to L2 learners may suggest that its role as a person-marker is extremely weak, since as we will see, person-markers may be relatively readily acquired.

6In fact, Boots-Ebenfield's data as summarized contained little evidence of L2 Russian users employing both aspectual forms of any individual verb for their respective functions.

7There are examples of apparently arbitrary lexically governed case in Kazak. For example, qarau, 'look at', requires complements marked with the dative case rather than the usual accusative case. Such verbs are rare, however.

8We are ugnoring rounding harmony, which is not represented in the orthography.

9The second experiment investigated the nominative-accusative contrast, where it appeared that sensitivity developed somewhat more quickly than in the case of the nominative-oblique contrast investigated in Experiment 1. In both experiments some verbal inflectional categories were investigated as well. One of those, person inflection, is also included in the Kazak experiment.

10In connection with Russian, the term oblique is commonly used to designate all non-nominative cases. We are using it in the more common sense of cases other than nominative, accusative and dative.

11The explanation outlined here differs somewhat from that in Thomson (2000).

12From the standpoint of this research, if not in general, it is unfortunate that the majority of international students in Kazakstan learn Russian rather than Kazak.

13In Thomson (2000) this second task was intended to be form-focussed as opposed to meaning-focussed. In analyazing the results, and relating them to introspections of the researcher, who was himself learning Russian, it was suggested that this task allowed fuller processing, but not necessarily a lot of analytical reflection. If so, then it too was meaning focussed. Unlike VanPatten's experiements (1994; VanPatten & Cadierno, 1993; VanPatten & Sanz, 1995) the participants were not monitoring for specific aspects of grammatical form. Recognizing an anomaly, for example, recognizing that the subject is marked as an instrument, requires comprehending the sentence in order to know that the noun in question is the subject and not an instrument. There was no way for participants to be on the lookout for specific errors, however. It is unreasonable to think that participants metalinguistically analyzed all details of spoken sentences in order to find the anomalies.

14In this regard, the Kazak experiment differs from the Russian experiment, since only in the Kazak experiment do the data pattern systematically in the Dual Task. It was argued that in the Russian experiment too little sensitivity to anomalies emerged to allow detection of the systematic pattern seen in the Listening Only task.

15This explanation was proposed in connection with Experiment 1 of Thomson (2000) and supported in experiment 2 of that same work. The problem was allowed to remain in the Kazak experiment in order to keep it parallel to the Russian experiment. It was therefore expected that there would be an artificially low number of responses to that anomaly in the Dual Task, and big jump in detections of it in the second task. That is what is observed, going from 1 detection in the first task (by a participant who had missed the immediately preceding anomaly) to 9 detections in the second task, i.e. 25% of the participants, or a nine-fold increase.

16This is puzzling in that the Kazak experiment included two other segments with anomalies that were immediately preceded by other segments with anomalies, and yet no control particpants showed evidence of a refractory period in these cases. These were the person anomaly and the place-harmony anomaly. In these cases, for the nonnative participants, the issue of a refractory period did not arise, since the preceding anomalies were reacted to by only zero to one participant.

17It would be reasonable to ask why such variables were not more carefully controlled. The reason was that Thomson (2000) chose to embed the errors in continuous texts, thus increasing the naturalness of the comprehension processing, while admittedly increasing the number of uncontrolled variables.

18Specifically, the collocation otyryp s&ars&ady, 'sitting, he grew tired' was taken as an error, since, the verb otyr-, 'sit' is extremely common in here-and-now descriptive statements as a auxiliary verb marking progressive aspect, and therefore the participant thought that the two verbs were erroneously reversed, the auxiliary being made the main verb. It is quite possible that other participants reacted similary.

19Presumably, the advantage would not result from increased processing of case form alone, but from overall increased processing ease and thoroughness.

20It is also worth noting that the two instances of anomalous use of the instrumental case were among the most detectable anomalies. With only two errors it is impossible to tell whether there is any difference in the tendency of the instrumental and locative cases to trigger morphosyntactic processing.

21It may be that this becomes true once a certain level of complexity is reached by an inflectional system, and although Russian is more complex than Kazak, both languages lie beyond that threshold.

22In Thomson (2000) it is argued at length that the construct of an internal grammar, valuable as it may be in theoretical linguistics, is not the appropriate construct for understanding language acquisition. Acquisition simply needs a comprehension system that carries out the appropriate processing functions in reaction to the forms it encounters, and a production system that complies with the needs of the comprehension system. We certainly feel that the older metaphor of learners revising their internal grammars, changing their opinion regarding which sentences are and are not well-formed, was misleading from the standpoint of acquiring the form-function connections of languages. Neither are we convinced that the later notion of learning as parameter setting has been fruitful in terms of concrete insights produced, however fruitful it may have been in stimulating valuable research.