Worrying about the past is normal for Joyce Yuen.
When communicating in English, the Hong Kong freshman has to pay close attention to properly conjugating verbs in the past tense.
“In Chinese, we indicate tense by telling what day we are doing that thing,” Yuen said. “I’m glad people here still know what I’m talking about sometimes, because I forget past participles and endings.”
Yuen’s native language, Mandarin Chinese, is the world’s most widely spoken language with more than one billion speakers. Mandarin Chinese does not mark tense as English does by changing the verb, but rather by adding words known as aspectual markers to the end of the verb.
Yuen began learning English at age six and has lived in the United States for the past two years. She described her command of tense as strong enough to convey most ideas when writing and speaking in English. For Yuen’s parents, who still live in Hong Kong and were not exposed to the language as children, English tense structure remains puzzling.
“I would say it’s much harder for them,” Yuen said. “There are so many tenses to learn and even though they could help me study English, they could never develop the knowledge in the same way.”
University of Kansas linguistics professor Alison Gabriele is researching adult second-language acquisition, and earlier this year completed a study on whether native speakers of Mandarin Chinese can fully acquire English tense as adult learners. Gabriele is working on analyzing and presenting this research in one of two new linguistics labs that opened this month on the fourth floor of the Dole Human Development Center.
“There is really a growing interest in what, if any, limitations there are on adult second-language acquisition,” Gabriele said. “Some researchers have made the very strong claim that if a particular property is not present in the native language, then it is not acquirable in the second language.”
To test this theory, Gabriele used computers to visually present two different stories to 32 adult native Mandarin Chinese speakers who were learning English. Thirteen of the learners were at an intermediate level of English proficiency while 19 were at an advanced level.
One story showed an artist finishing a portrait, and the other showed the artist working on a portrait. After viewing the stories, learners were presented with a sentence in English and asked to determine if the sentence was compatible with one of the stories.
“We make a context really clear and then see whether the participants think the sentence is true given that context,” Gabriele said.
One sentence was in the simple past tense: “Ken painted the portrait.” The second was in the present progressive tense: “Ken is painting the portrait.” The simple past corresponds to completed events but not to ongoing events, while the present progressive tense is compatible with ongoing events, yet not with completed events.
Gabriele said that most learners can correctly match the sentence in the simple past tense to the completed event without having to decipher tense, but they are not able to match the sentence in the present progressive tense to the ongoing event unless they have a solid grasp of English tense construction.
“This is an area of the grammar that seems to remain difficult, even for very advanced learners,” Gabriele said.
The results of the study showed that intermediate learners incorrectly allowed “Ken is painting the portrait” to refer to both stories, but advanced learners were able to restrict the present progressive tense to just the story of the ongoing event.
Gabriele said these results contradict previous research suggesting that traits not present in a learner’s native language cannot be acquired past what linguists call the “critical period” -- the time from infancy to puberty during which the mind can absorb languages quickly and easily.
“Advanced Chinese learners of English were actually able to interpret tense just as well as English native speakers,” Gabriele said. Though a person’s native language does influence their acquisition of a second language, she said the claim that certain traits are not acquirable is too strong. Gabriele said other factors like age, aptitude, motivation and environment may have as much or greater influence on a person’s ability to master elements of grammar unique to a second language.
“There is an enormous amount of individual variation, which makes the area very complicated,” she said.
Gabriele hoped the results of her study would be encouraging for adults trying to become fluent in any foreign language. She also thought the findings would be beneficial to foreign language instructors.
“We can see what types of cross-linguistic differences really matter for second-language learners,” Gabriele said. “If we see that a particular cross-linguistic difference is really challenging, then it could be emphasized in the appropriate way in a classroom.”
In the new lab, Gabriele is working on a presentation of her completed study for upcoming conferences. Though it has been open for only about three weeks, the lab is already in use for other research projects across the linguistics department. The lab’s large main room and two isolated rooms inside the lab provide better testing conditions for experiments.
“Before we moved to the new lab, we had to arrange a classroom to see multiple participants,” said Junko Maekawa, a graduate student from Japan who is one of Gabriele’s research assistants. “Fitting people in the small space wasn’t an ideal environment because people may get claustrophobic or distracted easily.”
The other new linguistics lab has electroencephalography (EEG) equipment, which measures electrical activity in the brain.
Linguistics professor Robert Fiorentino will use the equipment in researching neurolinguistics, a field that looks at the brain functions underlying language processes. Fiorentino said the lab’s new equipment will allow linguistics researchers to collect thorough data on brain activity, which will shed light on the neurological intricacies of language comprehension.
“When neurons work, they yield tiny electrical signals which can be detected on the scalp by electrodes,” Fiorentino said. “Using this method to directly measure brain activity during language tasks provides new evidence for precisely how the language system works.”
Gabriele said studying brain activity is important in decoding the process of second-language acquisition.
“Researchers are interested in how multiple languages are represented in the brain and whether second-language learners process the second language in the same way as native speakers,” she said.
The two labs will begin a collaborative research project in the fall that will look at KU students’ acquisition of Spanish as a second language. Gabriele said she will continue to focus much of her future research on speakers of East Asian languages like Mandarin Chinese, and also on those trying to learn the languages.
“These languages differ in very interesting ways from English,” Gabriele said. “We know very little about how learners actually interpret sentences and I think it is an area worth exploring.”
Seventy-eight students are enrolled in Chinese language courses at the University this semester. Margaret Tran, Derby freshman, decided to start learning Chinese to complement her planned career in the field of international environmental policy. Tran said that Chinese’s lack of complicated tense construction makes learning the language a little less daunting.
“It’s refreshing to not have all the tenses,” Tran said. “But then that’s really the only thing that’s easier about Chinese.”