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Referent salience affects second language article use*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2012

DANIJELA TRENKIC  and
NATTAMA PONGPAIROJ
DANIJELA TRENKIC*
Affiliation:
University of York
NATTAMA PONGPAIROJ
Affiliation:
Chulalongkorn University
*
Address for correspondence: Danijela Trenkic, Department of Education, University of York, York YO10 5DD, UK[email protected]
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Abstract

The effect of referent salience on second language (L2) article production in real time was explored. Thai (–articles) and French (+articles) learners of English described dynamic events involving two referents, one visually cued to be more salient at the point of utterance formulation. Definiteness marking was made communicatively redundant with all referents. Thai groups omitted articles more with more than with less salient referents. The results corroborate previous offline data suggestive of the salience effect for L2 users from article-less L1 backgrounds, but point against the view that this is due to the redundancy of definiteness marking. The results seem better explained by persistent grammatical competition between L1 and L2 structures, consistent with the view that language systems within a bilingual mind cannot be kept fully apart.

Keywords

referent saliencesecond language articlesThaiFrenchEnglish
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , January 2013 , pp. 152 - 166
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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Footnotes

*

The research reported in this paper was supported by the Thai–UK Collaborative Research Network Scholarship to the second author. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Information Structure Lecture Series at the Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen, the RCEAL Colloquia Series at the University of Cambridge, the conference on Models of Interaction in Bilinguals in Bangor, EUROSLA 18 in Aix-en-Provence, and the ISB7 in Utrecht. We thank the audiences at these meetings for their insightful and valuable comments which have shaped this paper. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their thorough and constructive comments and suggestions.

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