Events

開催予定の公開講演会・研究会（Upcoming Events）

中央大学人文科学研究所主催 公開講演会（Chuo University Open Lecture）

Date & Time: Saturday, October 19, 2019; 16:00 ~ 17:30

Venue: Chuo University, Tama Campus; Conference Room 1 (Building 2, 4th floor) [Access]

Speaker: Dr. William Snyder (Professor, University of Connecticut at Storrs, USA) [Website]

Title: On Neurodevelopmental Timing, and the Acquisition of Passives and Causatives

Children acquiring English are well-known to have specific difficulties with passives (i.e., long, verbal be-passives of actional verbs) until the age of about four years. While the frequency of be-passives in child-directed speech is low, children even younger than four succeed on structures that are still lower in frequency (e.g., direct-object wh-questions; Hirsch & Hartman 2006).  Hence, the delay in passives calls for a different kind of explanation. My recent work extends a line of investigation begun by Ken Wexler, who was the first person to propose that this delay follows, in some way, from the time-course of brain development in children.  

More specifically, I have been working to test and improve the Universal Freezing Hypothesis (UFH) that I developed in collaboration with Nina Hyams. In the most recent work (conducted in collaboration with Jason Borga), the idea is that a neurodevelopmental change occurs, around age four, in the brain's computational resources for language processing. The critical change involves representations: the sentences that give the younger children problems are the ones requiring them to represent a syntactic chain whose "tail" is contained inside the "head" of another chain. 

For example, if we assume some version of the "smuggling" proposals of Chris Collins (2002), an English be-passive will generally involve a structure along the following lines (where traces are represented as copies): The book was [PartP written <the book>] by Susan <PartP> . The tail of the chain headed by the derived subject (the book) is contained inside the head of a lower chain (i.e., the chain created by movement of the Participial Phrase). 

Positing a change in the representations available during language computation provides a way to account for the improvements that are sometimes found in three-year-olds' performance when the processing demands of the experimental method are reduced. Moreover, the current proposal makes strong, testable predictions about the particular syntactic structures that will, and will not, create difficulties for younger children. Structures to be considered in the talk will include both faire-causatives and experiencer predicates in French, as well as get-passives in English. 

中央大学人文科学研究所主催 公開講演会（Chuo University Open Lecture）

Date & Time: Monday, April 29, 2019; 10:50 ~ 12:20

Venue: Chuo University, Tama Campus; Room 3352 (Building 3, 3rd floor) [Access]

Speaker: Dr. Antonella Sorace (Professor, University of Edinburgh and Bilingualism Matters, UK) [Website]

Title: More than One Language: Myths, Science, and Implications for Society

Research on bilingualism shows that learning more than one language can give children and adults a range of linguistic and mental benefits. This is true regardless of whether languages are spoken or signed, or whether they have worldwide diffusion or are spoken only in particular regions. However, there are still many widespread old misconceptions - as well as some new ones - about what it means to have more than one language at different stages of life. I will first describe the main myths, facts and benefits of bilingualism over the lifespan. I will then show what our information and public engagement centre Bilingualism Matters is doing in the UK and internationally to disseminate correct information on bilingualism and to enable people to make informed decisions in different sectors of society.

中央大学平川科研プロジェクト主催 講演会（Chuo University Hirakawa-Kaken Project Lecture）

Date & Time: Saturday, April 27, 2019; 16:00 ~ 18:00

Venue: Chuo University, Tama Campus; Conference Room 1 (Building 2, 4th floor) [Access]

Speaker: Dr. Antonella Sorace (Professor, University of Edinburgh and Bilingualism Matters, UK) [Website]

Title: Bilingualism: Seeing Both the Forest and the Trees

Research on adult bilingualism shows that selective aspects of grammar become variable in speakers experiencing native language (L1) attrition from long-term use of a second language (L2). These are the same aspects that remain variable even in highly proficient L2 speakers of the same language. Why do we see this convergence between L1 attrition and L2 acquisition when we compare different groups, and only for some language structures? Is there a relationship between openness of the L1 to change and level of L2 attainment? I will consider three possible accounts, examining their strengths and weaknesses in the light of available data from different bilingual contexts and language combinations. At this stage, two general conclusions are possible: first, understanding the big picture requires serious consideration of individual differences; second, it also requires interdisciplinary research on different aspects of bilingualism that combines the insights of both linguistic and cognitive models.

中央大学人文科学研究所主催 公開講演会（Chuo University Open Lecture）

Date & Time: Monday, March 18, 2019; 16:00 ~ 18:00

Venue: Chuo University, Tama Campus; Conference Room 1 (Building 2, 4th floor) [Access]

Speaker: Dr. Yuichi Suzuki (Associate Professor, Kanagawa University, Japan) [Website]

Title: Investigations into the neural basis of explicit and implicit second language knowledge

This talk first provides an overview of previous research on measurements of explicit and implicit knowledge in a second language. After presenting theoretical distinctions between explicit and implicit knowledge, validity evidence for the previous measurements is critically evaluated from several perspectives (factor analytic approach, individual difference approach, and concurrent methodology). I then present my recent conceptual replication of the previous study (Suzuki & DeKeyser, 2015 in Language Learning) that cast doubt on the validity of traditional explicit and implicit knowledge tests. This ongoing study uses an fMRI technique and envisages to explore the neural basis of explicit and implicit knowledge.

中央大学人文科学研究所主催 公開講演会（Chuo University Open Lecture）

Date & Time: Saturday, November 10, 2018; 15:15 ~ 18:00

Venue: Chuo University, Tama Campus; Conference Room 2 (Building 2, 4th floor) [Access]

Talk 1 (15:15 ~ 16:15)

Speaker: Chariya Prapobratanakul (Chulalongkorn University, Thailand / Institute of Cultural Science, Chuo University (Visiting Researcher))

Title: Variability of English Past Tense Morphology by L1 Thai Learners and L1 French Learners

 The study explored variability of English past tense morphology by L1 Thai learners. Based on the Failed Functional Features Hypothesis (FFFH) (Hawkins & Chan, 1997; Hawkins & Liszka, 2003), variability of English past tense morphology by L1 Thai and L1 French learners was due to non-target-like syntactic representation, not target-like syntactic representation according to the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis (MSIH) (Prévost & White, 2000; Lardiere, 2003). The participants of the study were 30 L1 Thai and 30 L1 French advanced learners of English. English and Thai are different in that past tense inflectional morphology is obligatory in English, but not in Thai. Data were collected from a grammaticality judgment test (GJT) and a cloze test. The results suggested that the L1 Thai learners’ incorrect suppliances of English past tense morphemes were significantly higher than those of the L1 French learners in both tests. Moreover, the L1 Thai learners’ asymmetries of incorrect suppliances of English regular and irregular past tense morphemes were also evidenced. Based on the FFFH, the lack of the past feature in the Thai learners’ L1 led to variability in the L2 English past tense morphemes as well as the asymmetries of regular and irregular past tense morphemes. The L2 English pastness is therefore unresettable for the L1 Thai learners.

Talk 2 (16:30 ~ 18:00)

Speaker: Dr. Roumyana Slabakova (Professor, University of Southampton, UK) [Website]

Title: Are Pronouns Difficult Words?

Children acquiring their native language (L1) have been reported to have greater difficulty in interpreting pronouns than reflexives. In addition, they are less accurate when pronouns refer to referential antecedents (e.g., Mama Bear) than to quantified antecedents (e.g., every bear), and when they hear full pronouns as opposed to reduced pronouns. In this joint work with Lydia White, it is hypothesized that similar difficulties of interpretation will occur for (non-advanced) second language (L2) learners, due to an elevated computational burden, as argued for L1 acquisition by Reinhart (2006, 2011). We report on an experiment with adult learners of English (L1s French and Spanish), using a truth-value judgment task. Participants interpreted reduced and full pronouns bound by referential and quantified antecedents in aurally presented test sentences. The learners’ performance was affected by type of pronoun and antecedent. When a referential antecedent is combined with a full pronoun, learners’ accuracy was significantly lower. These results are in line with Reinhart’s analysis of reference set computation in processing pronouns. We will discuss implications of these findings for language processing.

中央大学文学部主催 公開講演会（Chuo University Open Lecture）

Date & Time: Thursday, November 5, 2018; 16:40 ~ 18:10

Venue: Chuo University, Tama Campus; Room 3207 (Building 3, 2nd floor) [Access]

Speaker: Dr. Kook-Hee Gil (Professor, University of Sheffield, UK) [Website]

Title: From Linguistics to the Language Classroom: Where Theory Meets Practice

This talk reviews studies in second language classroom research from a cross-theoretic perspective, arguing that the classroom holds the potential for bringing together researchers from opposing theoretical orientations. We will see how generative and general cognitive approaches share a view of language that implicates both implicit and explicit knowledge, with a bias towards implicit knowledge. Arguing that it is implicit knowledge that should be the object of research, classroom research will be shown to benefit from incorporating insights from a generative understanding of language. Specifically, there is a need for a more nuanced view of the complexity of language in terms of linguistic domain, and the interaction between those domains. Generative second language acquisition research that shows developmental differences in terms of both linguistic domain and interface is reviewed. The core argument is a call for more attention to the ‘what’ of language development in classroom research and, by implication, teaching practice. As such, the language classroom is seen to offer potential for research that addresses both the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of language development.

中央大学文学部主催 公開講演会（Chuo University Open Lecture）

Date & Time: Monday, June 18, 2018; 16:40 ~ 18:10

Venue: Chuo University, Tama Campus; Room 3455 (Building 3, 4th floor)

Speaker: Dr. Leah Roberts (Professor, University of York, UK) [Website]

Title: Cross-Linguistic Influences in Second Language Sentence Processing

It is uncontroversial that when using a second language (L2), a learner's first language is always active to varying degrees (Grojean, 1997; Odlin, 2012). In this talk, we will present data from a range of methods (explicit judgement tasks, self-paced reading, EEG) from our studies investigating how a learner's first language affects L2 learners' sentence processing. In a number of cases, we find that the results from highly time-sensitive methods offer a different picture of learners' knowledge to those tasks which arguably tap into more conscious or explicit processes. These results have implications both for theories of second language acquisition, and for how, on a more general, practical level, learners' knowledge of the L2 is assessed.