March 2016 - Present
In 1902, a group of South African immigrants with farming experience arrived to Buenos Aires with the mission to settle in the arid lands of Patagonia. More than a century later, Afrikaans is still spoken in the farms and cities near where the first Boer settlement took place. The present speakers of Afrikaans are the last generation of bilingual speakers of Afrikaans and Spanish in Patagonia, creating a rather unique Spanish-Afrikaans language contact situation. This project is a collaborative effort with other colleagues from the University of Michigan.
Check out our websiteDo L2 learners with better working memory resources benefit from learning contexts where the L1 is inhibited? If so, how? This project examines individual differences in Second Language Acquisition and the specific relationship between cognitive abilities and different dimensions of L2 acquisition such as degree of proficiency.
There is growing interest in SLA to understand the relationship between cognitive abilities and fluency, or oral speech production, in a second language. This project addresses the development of this relationship with learners who do and do not have previous abroad experience.
Although there are a number of questionnaires that address specific language use in different learning contexts, the Language Contact Profile designed by Freed, Dewey, Segalowitz, & Halter (2004) is one of the most comprehensive and widely used in the field. This research project is an attempt to revisit Freed et al.'s questionnaire, taking into account the particulars of short intensive immersion programs.
It is well-known to those that interact with L2 learners that L2 speakers hesitate more in their L2 than in their L1. However, it is not so clear what happens to such hesitation phenomena. Are such hesitation slots permanent? Do they change or become substituted over time as L2 syntactic complexity develops? This project accounts for this development in L2 learners with experience from three different learning contexts.
What is fluency? Previous literature provides a variety of metrics to account for speech production, but we still need to understand which metrics really matter to listeners, if this varies, and if so, why is this the case? This project also looks at rhythm as a possible component in the development of fluency.