Isabelle Bright and Meadow Conner, “Sensitivity to Quantifier Driven Focus Effects in Second Language”
Mentor: Glenn Starr, Linguistics, Letters & Science (College of)
Poster #106
In English, the sentences “A few/Few students attended the lecture” create different focus effects among native English speakers (Moxey & Sanford, 1987; Sanford et al., 1996). The positive quantifier “a few” creates focus on the reference set (i.e. the students who attended the lecture) in the continuation sentence which contains the anaphor “they” (i.e. they enjoyed the lecture), whereas the negative quantifier “few” creates focus on the complement set (i.e. the students who did not attend the lecture) in the continuation sentence (i.e. they skipped class). Though the phenomenon also exists in Italian, among other languages, the quantifiers that elicit contrasting focus have more distinguishable lexical forms (as in Italian’s “alcuni/pochi”). The subtle difference in English is likely to cause confusion in second language (L2) learners. We investigate whether Italian native speakers learning English are sensitive to this contrast. Since the “a few/few” contrast is more subtle in English, we expect learners will not display sensitivity to this difference, at least at lower levels of proficiency. This study investigates how native speakers of Italian learn to distinguish between the quantifiers in terms of focus effects. Experiment 1 tests learners’ receptive knowledge by asking participants to rate the naturalness of sentence pairs with contrasting focus effects on a 7-pt Likert scale (1=unnatural, 7=natural). Experiment 2 tests learners’ productive knowledge by asking participants to read a sentence beginning with “few” or “a few” and select a follow up sentence with either reference or complement set focus in a controlled production task. We predict lower proficiency learners will not distinguish between the quantifier driven focus effects due to the lexical similarity in English’s forms. We expect higher proficiency learners to have successfully distinguished between the two quantifiers and their contrasting foci.