Announcement for a Research Meeting on Sunday, December 15th, 2013

Workshop on Linguistic Analyses of Foreign Language Learning:
Automatization in Real-Time Comprehension and Production
in conjunction with
The 15th Korea-Japan Workshop on Linguistics and Language Processing

Announcements

Registration:
No registration process/fees required for participation.
If you intend to participat, however, please send a message to harada@waseda.jp with your name and affiliation in the body and "workshop 2013/12/15" in the subject line as we may need to submit a list of potential participants in case the building is closed for Sunday.
Dates and Venue

Date	December 15th Sunday, 2013
Venue	8-303/304/305 on the third floor of building 8 in Waseda Campus of Waseda University N.B. If the building is closed for Sunday, enter through the door to the right of the automatic sliding glass door of the building that you would find to your left as you come into the campus via the South Gate and tell the guards that you are coming for the "workshop" on the third floor.

program [subject to change without prior notice]

09:00-09:20

preparations and registration

09:20-11:45

session 1

moderator Yasunari Harada

09:20-09:25	Jae-Woong Choe	opening remark
09:25-10:35	Mitsuyo Toya, Kazuchika Manabe and Kiyoko Ishizu	What does the "high-frequency" issue do to the foreign language listening? Methodological issues [abstract] [slides]
10:35-10:45		short break
10:45-11:15	Miwa Morishita	Psycholinguistic research on sentence production by Japanese EFL learners based on syntactic priming experiments [abstract] [slides]
11:15-11:55	Miwa Morishita and Franklin Chang	Structural priming and verb-overlap in L2 English learners at multiple points in development [abstract] [slides]

11:55-13:15

lunch break

13:15-14:55

session 2

moderator Mitsuyo Toya

13:15-13:45	Chie Nakamura, Manabu Arai and Yasunari Harada	Use of Verb Subcategorization Information in L2 Sentence Processing [abstract] [slides]
13:45-14:15	Tomoko Endo, Daisuke Yokomori, Mayumi Kawamura, Masanori Suzuki and Yasunari Harada	"That's all. Thank you.": A case of naturally-occurring cooperative learning in Japanese EFL classrooms (tentative) [abstract] [slides]
14:15-14:55	Ralph Rose	Speech hesitation patterns in English by native speakers of Japanese [abstract] [slides]

14:55-15:10

break

15:10-17:25

session 3

moderator Miwa Morishita

15:10-15:40	Risa Nabei and Yasunari Harada	Comprehension of unstressed elements in English sentences by Japanese learners of English [abstract] [slides
15:40-16:30	Eunkyung Hwang & Jae-Woong Choe	The role of genre, gender, and proficiency on syntactic complexity in essays by Korean EFL students [abstract] [slides]
16:30-17:20	Charles Browne	The new General Service List: foundational vocabulary for 2nd language learners [abstract] [slides]
17:20-17:25	Yasunari Harada	closing remark

17:25-17:40

wrap up and clean up

access maps

http://www.waseda.jp/jp/campus/index.html

http://www.waseda.jp/jp/campus/waseda.html
Topics

automatization

syntactic processing

Japanese EFL learners

learner corpora and learning data

Organized and supported in part by:

Grants-in-Aid Scientific Research (B)	21320109	Additional Data Collection and Preliminary Analysis of Elicited Extended Spontaneous Utterances by English Learners in Japanese Undergraduate Courses	PI: Yasunari Harada
Grants-in-Aid Scientific Research (C)	23520752	A Psycholinguistic Study on Syntactic Processing in Speaking by Japanese EFL learners	PI: Miwa Morishita
Grants-in-Aid Scientific Research (C)	23520778	Listening Comprehension Practice for Japanese EFL Learners using High Frequency Enhancement: Behavioral Analysis and Pedagogical Implementation	PI: Toya Mitsuyo
Grants-in-Aid Scientific Research (C)	24520661	Hesitation Phenomena in Second Language Development	PI: Ralph Rose
Grants-in-Aid Challenging Exploratory Research	24652133	Psycholinguistic Study on Listening Comprehension and Automatization of Syntactic Processing by Japanese EFL Learners	PI: Yasunari Harada

Jointly hosted by:

Institute for the Study of Language and Information, Waseda University

Institute for Digital Enhancement of Cognitive Development, Waseda University
Co-sponsored by:

JELES: The English Language Education Society of Japan

JASLLI: Japanese Association for the Study of Logic, Language and Information (formerly known as Logico-Linguistic Society of Japan)

abstracts

Mitsuyo Toya, Kazuchika Manabe and Kiyoko Ishizu, What does the "high-frequency" issue do to the foreign language listening? Methodological issues
English teachers in Japan may notice the existence of English-learning materials that focuses on the "high-frequency" issue of English sounds (e.g. Shinohara, 2006). That is, Japanese learners are said to lack the sensitivity towards high-frequency sounds that is essential in the target language acquisition. In order to investigate the effect of high-frequency sound discrimination, Toya, Manabe, & Ishizu (2011) tested Japanese participants on pure-tone discrimination at frequencies of 2,000 Hz and 3,000 Hz as well as L-R categorization that requires discrimination in F3 (over 2,000 Hz) with [light-right] [play-pray] pairs. The results indicated that participants' sensitivity towards high-frequency sounds have some effects on general listening ability (as measured by GTEC). It was also discovered that there exist a great variety in pure-tone discrimination among the participants with the low to mid-proficiency, which should be paid a fair amount of attention when teaching listening. Based on such findings, the current presentation gives demonstrations on how we are testing the listeners' sensitivity towards the high-frequency sounds and what would be the possibilities of material modifications for the training focusing on the issue of "high-frequency."

Miwa Morishita, Psycholinguistic research on sentence production by Japanese EFL learners based on syntactic priming experiments
Syntactic priming refers to a general tendency found in language users to produce a syntactic structure that replicates the kind of structure encountered or pruduced immedately before and is considered to show their sensitivity to syntax. This has been observed in the case of Japanese EFL learners as well as with L1 English speakers in a variety of psycholinguistic experiments. In this presentation, I will talk about the results of syntactic priming experiments including sentence completion tasks (e.g., Morishita, 2011, 2012) and scripted interaction tasks (Morishita, 2013), which I've conducted so far.
Franklin Chang and Miwa Morishita, Structural priming and verb-overlap in L2 English learners at multiple points in development
We examined structural priming and the lexical boost in 178 elementary-level Japanese EFL university students in a computer-based sentence generation task. Structure and verb overlap were manipulated within dative structures. The students saw the prime phrase-by-phrase in the center of the circle (e.g., "the butcher," "offered," "the worker," and "the food") and had to match each phrase with the corresponding element on the circle. Target production was a sentence generation task, where students saw phrases like "the woman," "offered," "her friend," "a dress," and "to," and they generated a sentence by selecting phrases on the circle. We coded whether they produced a DO (e.g., the woman offered her friend a dress) or a PD (e.g., the woman offered a dress to her friend). The students were tested at three points as they learned English in their classes. The test was done so that half of the items were the same structure at each test period (repeated) and half alternated with the other structure every other test period (alternating).
Adult L1 theories of priming assume abstract structures and verb-structure links, but these links may not be present in early L2 learners. Production was difficult for these elementary-level students and only 26% of the sentences on average were PD or DO structures. We found a significant structural priming effect only when the verb overlaps between prime and target (z=3.3, p < 0.001), but not when the verb was different. Abstract structural priming increased after more study (z=2.1, p < 0.04). These results are the opposite of what was found in L1 children (Rowland, Chang, Ambridge, Pine, & Lieven, 2012), where abstract priming was found earlier on, but verb-structure priming grew slowly over development. This suggests that L2 learners are using different strategies from L1 children in their language learning.
In addition, the students' ability to produce correct PD/DO target structures increased significantly both across trials within test period (z=4.7, p < 0.001) and across the different test periods (z=7.6, p < 0.001). Learners improved more when structures alternated across periods suggesting long-term memories of the structures presented at earlier periods (z=3..8, p < 0.001) and greater learning when structures varied as predicted by error-based learning mechanisms (Chang, Dell, & Bock, 2006).

Chie Nakamura, Manabu Arai and Yasunari Harada, Use of Verb Subcategorization Information in L2 Sentence Processing
Previous studies in English demonstrated influence of verb subcategorization information in processing structurally ambiguous sentences (Stowe et al., 1991), providing evidence for the use of lexically specified information in parsing. However, recent research in L2 reported that Japanese EFL learners initially adopt the NP analysis with an intransitive verb incorrectly in reading a sentence such as While the audience cried the actor rested behind the curtain. This suggests that they ignore subcategorization information in building the initial syntactic analysis (Nakamura et al., 2013). The finding is consistent with the first resort account, which predicts that comprehenders deterministically adopt the NP analysis regardless of verb specific information (Pickering & Traxler, 2003). Alternatively, it is possible that influence of subcategorization information was eliminated because EFL learners used the simple strategy of adopting the NP analysis when the NP appeared directly following the verb.
To address this issue, the current study tested the structure with unbounded dependency and examined whether EFL learners would adopt the NP analysis even when the NP does not appear following the verb. The results indicate that Japanese EFL learners adopted the NP analysis only with optionally transitive verbs but not with intransitive verbs, providing evidence for the use of verb subcategorization information in L2 parsing.

Tomoko Endo, Daisuke Yokomori, Mayumi Kawamura, Masanori Susuki and Yasunari Harada, "That's all. Thank you.": A case of naturally-occurring cooperative learning in Japanese EFL classrooms (tentative)
In this talk we will report on our ongoing project on the interaction among students during group activities. As a semester goes on, more students are observed to use "Thatfs all" and/or "Thank you" when they finish their responses in oral response practice. Some students even correct other students when they do not use such expressions. We suggest that this may be a case of collaborative learning without explicit instruction.

Ralph Rose, Speech hesitation patterns in English by native speakers of Japanese:
Learners of a second language must gradually learn to use speech hesitation patterns that are typical of the target language. That is, they must learn to pause in the right places for an appropriate duration, to use hesitation fillers such as uh/um appropriately, and to initiate repair sequences efficiently. This talk will present evidence from a crosslinguistic corpus to illustrate how the hesitation patterns of Japanese learners of English progress as their proficiency in English increases. The results suggest ways that specific features of learners' hesitation patterns can be employed to assess proficiency.

Risa Nabei and Yasunari Harada, Comprehension of unstressed elements in English sentences by Japanese learners of English
In this presentation we will report on our ongoing research regarding listening comprehension of relatively weakly pronounced elements in English sentences, namely, functional words such as prepositions and particles and inflectional endings such as plural markers of nounds and past or participial endings of vergbs. Japanese learners of English experience difficulty in identifying these elements as they listen to naturally spoken English sentences, partly because they are not pronounced as distinctively as those learners might expect. Another reason is that their grammatical knowledge is not automitized in a way that it would be evoked immediately as they listen to orally presented English sentences.

Eunkyung Hwang & Jae-Woong Choe, The role of genre, gender, and proficiency on syntactic complexity in essays by Korean EFL students
In this presentation we will report on our ongoing research regarding the role of the variables like genre, gender, and proficiency level in terms of their effects on the so-called syntactic complexity (in a broader sense) in the EFL context. There have been some conflicting reports on some differences in syntactic complexity, for example, between narrative vs. argumentative essays. Our research is based on YELC (Yonsei English Learner Corpus), which contains over three thousand pairs of narrative and argumentative essays written by college entry level English learners in Korea. We annotate the corpus and extract from it the syntactic complexity measures using a software introduced in Lu (2010). We then compare the effects of the three variables on each measure of the syntactic complexity by making use of statistical measures like the Wilcoxon rank sum test and the Kruskal-Wallis rank sum test.

Charles Browne, The new General Service List: foundational vocabulary for 2nd language learners
In 1953, Michael West published a list of important vocabulary words known as the General Service List (GSL). Although the corpus used was small by today's standards (only 5 million words) and is of course missing many modern high frequency words such as "email", "Internet" or "cell phone", the list was the remarkable culmination of nearly 2 decades of pre-computer era corpus research and a series of meetings and discussions with corpus linguists and experienced EFL and ESL teachers around the world.
On the 60th anniversary of the publication of this list, I would like to introduce an interim New General Service List (NGSL). The NGSL is based on a carefully selected 273 million word subsection of the more than 1 billion word CEC (Cambridge English Corpus) and uses the power of modern computers and corpus analysis software to help create a list of high-frequency words that provides a higher coverage of texts with fewer words than the original GSL. Like the GSL before it, this interim list is seen as a starting point for discussion and debate with corpus linguists and experienced EFL and ESL teachers about what words should be added/deleted - a website dedicated to gathering resources to help make this list more useful to teachers, students and researchers will also be introduced.

authors, moderators and organizers

Dr. Browne is Professor of Applied Linguistics & TESOL and head of the EFL teacher-training program at Meiji Gakuin University. He is a specialist in Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition and Extensive Reading, especially as they apply to online learning environments. In addition to the New General Service List, he has also helped to create a wide variety of research-based language learning and analysis software such as OGTE (Online Graded Text Editor), ER-Central, EnglishCentral, WordEngine, V-Check, and GoFluent, and works hard to share this knowledge with teachers, researchers and software developers through countless hand-on workshops and courses with Boards of Education around Japan as well as Columbia Teachers College and Temple University Japan.

Franklin Chang is a Lecturer in the School of Psychology at the University of Liverpool. He was an assistant professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Hanyang University in Seoul and was a research associate in the CLIP section of the Natural Language Research Group in the NTT Communication Science Laboratories in Kyoto Prefecture. His research examines the relationship between learning and processing through the use of connectionist models and human experiments.See the following for more details:
https://sites.google.com/site/sentenceproductionmodel/cv
Jae-Woong Choe received his Ph. D. in linguistics from University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1987, and is currently Professor of Linguist ics at Korea University. He is a former President of the Korean Society for Language and Information and served as a Steering Committee member of PACLIC for the period of 2005-2012. His areas of interest include Theoretical Linguistics, mainly on Semantics and Pragmatics, and Computational/Corpus-based Linguistics.

Tomoko Endo is a postdoctoral research fellow of Japan Society for Promotion of Science, affiliated with University of Tsukuba. Her research interests include Interactional Linguistics, language socialization and grammaticalization.

Yasunari Harada is Professor at Faculty of Law and Director at the Institute for Digital Enhancement of Cognitive Development of Waseda University. He is a former President of the Logico-Linguistics Society of Japan and a Steering Committee member of PACLIC, With Jong-Bok Kim as his partner and counterpart, he has been organizing Korea-Japan Workshop on Linguistics and Language Processing since 2004. See the following for more details:
http://www.f.waseda.jp/harada/index.html
Dr. Eunkyung Hwang is a researcher of the National Institute for International Education (NIIED), affiliated with the Ministry of Education in Korea. Her research interests include L2 writing assessment, interlanguage development, and language education.
Kiyoko Ishizu is a speech pathologist and an associate professor at Seirei Christopher University, Shizuoka, Japan. She is currently involved in pathological education. Her research interests lie in psychoacoustics, especially hearing dominance.

Mayumi Kawamura is chief Language Annotator in Project VALIS.

Chie Nakamura is a postdoctoral research fellow of Japan Society for Promotion of Science, affiliated with the University of Tokyo. Her research employs psycholinguistic experimentation to clarify natures of language proficiency among Japanese learners of English.

Kazuchika Manabe is a psychology professor at the Graduate School of Social Cultural Studies, Nihon University, Tokorozawa, Japan. His expertise is behavior analysis, comparative psychology, psychoacoustics and bioacoustics.

Miwa Morishita is an associate professor at Kobe Gakuin University. She completed her BA at Rikkyo University and her MA and Ph.D. at Kobe University. Her areas of research include psycholinguistics, second language acquisition, and language education.

Ralph Rose is an associate professor in the Center for English Language Education (CELESE) at the Waseda University Faculty of Science and Engineering. His research interests lie in investigating the use of hesitation phenomena in first and second language speech. He has also studied learner autonomy and methods for the automatic production of vocabulary tests.

Masanori Suzuki is Principal Test Development Manager of Pearson Knowledge Technologies.

Mitsuyo Toya is a professor of English Education and Applied Linguistics at University of the Ryukyus, Okinawa, Japan, where she teaches both English and teacher training courses. Her interests include material development, teaching methodologies, curriculum evaluation in addition to the role of "high-frequency" sound discrimination in foreign language listening.

Daisuke Yokomori is a postdoctoral research fellow of Japan Society for Promotion of Science, affiliated with Nagoya University. His research interests include Interactional Linguistics and conversational analysis.

notices

First drafted July 20th, 2013. Last revised December 15th, 2013.
The meeting and talks announced in this web page are subject to change without prior notice. The organizers should not be held responsible for any purported or actual damages by prospective participants due to those changes.