engleski

Development of Italian and Croatian Self-Paced Listening Task

The majority of studies investigating language comprehension have used off-line experiments, for example, a picture-matching task in which a speaker hears a sentence and has to choose the appropriate picture. Marinis (2010) states that in such tasks speaker has time to think about the stimuli so the answer, provided after the linguistic stimuli has been processed, is controlled. On-line tasks (OLT), on the other hand, target the implicit language knowledge by measuring automatic reactions at the moment of processing. Self-paced listening task is an OLT presented on the computer or tablet. Participant controls the speed of the text that she/he listens by using buttons or touch screen to hear the next word or a phrase. The exact time of each press is recorder by a reaction-time (RT) software such as E-prime. The task is based on the assumption that RT correlates with processing demands of the word/phrase. Longer times reflect processing difficulties such as ones related to ungrammaticality or any kind of violation of the sentence (Marinis 2010). Verbal morphology tasks for Croatian and Italian were designed to measure processing of three types of stimuli: 1. correct verb forms, 2. ungrammatical verb forms in accordance with more general verb forming rule (such overregularised forms are typical for language acquisition process – e.g. Hrzica, 2012), 3. ungrammatical verb forms in accordance with less general verb forming rule. Since it requires higher level of language knowledge to detect errors of type 2, less competent speaker would need less time to press the button after type 2 stimuli. They would not recognise the erroneous form and would treat it as a correct one resulting in faster RT. More competent speaker would show higher RT to type 2 stimuli because the error would be recognised resulting in slower RT because of higher processing demands. Marinis, T. (2010) Using on-line processing methods in language acquisition research. In: Experimental Methods in Language Acquisition Research. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 139- 162 Hržica, G. (2012). Daj mi to napisaj: preopćavanja glagolske osnove u usvajanju hrvatskoga jezika ‘Overregularisations of verb stem in Croatian language acquisition’. Suvremena lingvistika, 38, 74 ; 189-208.

language assessment; self-paced listening; verbal morphology

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