So let’s talk about switches. In any system, you have to get your toggles in the right
positions if you want everything to run smoothly. And language is no exception: when you acquire
one, you have to make all these decisions about how that language works. But then when
you go and learn a new one, are those switches going to stay frozen in place? Nope, you can
still happily flip to your heart’s content. I’m Moti Lieberman, and this is the Ling Space.
When we learn a second language, there’s a lot to pick up: what sounds it uses, what
words it has and how it makes them, all the ways it crafts its sentences and transforms
them into meanings. Fortunately, we know a fair amount about how languages can work already:
we transfer over everything that we know about our first language, or L1, and that works
as the base from which we can build our new language, or L2. And it really is everything:
when you learn an L2, the entire grammar, your whole knowledge base about your L1, gets moved.
Included in that are all your parameter settings. Parameters are the ways in which languages
can differ one to the next. Do you move your question words when you ask things, or
do you leave them where they are? Do you always need a subject, or can you leave them out
when it’s clear from the context what you’re talking about? Do you use stress in your words,
or not? Those are all things that you had to learn when you acquired your L1, and so
to start out, it’s all stuff that gets transferred over to the L2.
But because that’s the stuff that varies between languages, if you want to speak as
native-like as possible in your L2, you’re going to have to flip a lot of these switches
over. For a long time, though, that was a big part of the debate in linguistics: can
you actually reset those parameters? Or are you ultimately stuck on whatever you had
for your L1? Well, it could be that whether you can reset is different if you’re a kid
vs. an adult. After all, kids have an easier time acquiring language in general, and particularly
those deeper grammatical points that they can just pick up intuitively. As it happens,
those usually map to parameters. So even if we see transfer from the L1, it looks like
kids should be able to subconsciouly pick up those parameter differences, and flip the
switches, no problem. But does that actually happen?
Let’s take a look at a case study of a Turkish boy named Erdem, who moved to the UK when
he was 4. When he first started meeting with a linguist to look at his English, he’d
only spent three months in the UK, of which two were spent mostly at home in a Turkish-language
environment. He’d only been immersed in English at a nursery school for a month or
so. So really, that’s not much English exposure yet. What could we expect to find?
Here’s the thing: Turkish and English differ in headedness, or the placement of the head
of a syntactic phrase with respect to its complement. Take a sentence like “Kat could
not stop Annie from cheating.” Since English is head-initial, that means the tense,
“could”, comes before its complement, the negation “not”; “stop” shows up
before its object, “Annie”; the preposition “from” appears before “cheating,”
etc. That’s how English works – first you get the head, and then the complement.
Turkish, on the other hand, works exactly the other way around – the head always shows
up after the complement. So Erdem, when he was just starting out in English, was making
the assumption that it works that way, too. In the first times he met with the researcher,
he said things like “I something eating” and “Finish no”, where the head comes
last. The verb in the first sentence and the negation in the second show up at the end.
But English is amazingly full of evidence that it’s head-initial. Every sentence that you
hear where the verb comes before the object, or a noun before a preposition, is one more
piece of data to tell you that English is the opposite of Turkish. So maybe it’s not
a huge surprise that Erdem worked this out without too much difficulty. But here’s
the thing: he did it basically immediately. Sure, through the handful of sessions that he had
in the first three months, whenever he spoke in English, he went for that Turkish head-final
setting. But suddenly, in month 4, his system flipped, and he was making regular, head-initial
English sentences, like “You eating apple”, or “I not eat cornflake”. He might not
have had the grammar quite right yet, but he clearly had worked headedness out: he very reliably
used the English setting. Just like flipping a switch.
The thing is, maybe we’d expect kids to be able to pull off learning new settings
more easily. After all, kids are amazing at soaking up new languages and implicitly knowing
what they need to do to match the community around them. But for adults, it’s often
more challenging to pull that off. Is that kind of parameter resetting just for kids?
Or can adults do it, too?
Let’s take a look at another word order variation between languages to address that
question. In languages like English and Chinese, verbs stay down in the verb phrase. So in
a sentence like “Jones does not age much”, the verb “age” stays below “not”,
which is the negation. But some languages, like French or Japanese, have verbs that itch
to move up in the tree. In a normal sentence, verbs in those languages move up to the tense
position in IP – so, the same sentence in French would be “Jones vieillit pas beaucoup”.
And you can see, the verb “vieillit” is before the negation “pas” – so it must have moved up.
Or, how about this: both English and French can create yes/no questions by moving the
tense up before the subject. Now, English sticks a “do” in for that, so like “Do the
fairies go to school?”, and the verb stays low. But because French moves the verb to tense,
it’s there when you want to move it for the question, so like “Vont les fées
à l’école?” All of those are because of the parametric difference in how strongly
the sentence wants that verb in the tense position.
Okay - so can adult L2 learners reset this parameter and stick their verbs in the right
place? Well, one researcher looked at French learners of English by using a task that got
them to create these questions themselves, and found that out of over 1100 questions
posed by these L2 English speakers, all but 2 of them had the English word order, without the French-style
verb raising. And in a preference ranking task with the same participants, the L2 learners
consistently rejected sentences with French-style negation or questions in English, such as
“The court likes not the forest”, or “Likes Jeanne swordplay?” So they look like they’ve
flipped to the English setting.
A separate study looked at how English and French speakers place their adverbs in Chinese,
in which the verb stays low, meaning adverbs come before it. But no matter their L1, the
L2 learners get their adverb placement right. They both accept and produce sentences like
this one, which means “Coyote often watches humans”, but don’t produce or accept sentences
like this one, with the verb and adverb flipped, so like “Coyote watches often humans.”
That might be the right word order in other languages, like French, but even French native
speakers know that Chinese doesn’t behave like that.
So does that mean that L2 speakers can just flip any parameter they want? Well… maybe not.
Sometimes the data in the L2, compared to your L1 setting, won't let you flip
to a native-like position, as we’ll talk about back on the website. But it also may
be that some things are outright unflippable. Like, let’s look at stress. If you’re
in a language like English, Portuguese, or Ukrainian, you use stress in your words, but
if you’re a French or Turkish speaker, you don’t. All you do in French and Turkish
is make the end of the phrase a bit stronger, to mark when you’re done. But there’s
no regular, word-level stress that needs to be learned.
That means that if you want to sound native-like in Turkish, you have to get rid of your stress
if you have it. And a study from 2012 looked at whether that was possible. French speakers,
who didn’t have stress to begin with, didn’t have any problems getting the Turkish system.
English speakers, though, couldn’t quite pull it off. Even as they made closer and
closer approximations of what Turkish sounds like, they still had stress in their words
in a way the French and Turkish speakers didn’t. So maybe for something fundamental to phonology
like stress, you’re just stuck.
But overall, when we move into a new language, we’re perfectly capable of working out the
ways in which our native tongue differs from it. Making the sentences match the L2 parameters
is usually well within our grasp. All we have to do is reach into our minds and flip those switches
So we’ve reached the end of the Ling Space for this week. If you followed my word order,
you learned that when we acquire a new language, we need to change the parameter settings from
our L1 to match our L2; that both children and adults are able to change these properties
to match the new language, once they have enough data; and that some things, like phonological
stress, can prove perhaps too much to reset if they’re in your L1.
The Ling Space is produced by me, Moti Lieberman. It’s directed by Adèle-Elise Prévost,
and it’s written by both of us. Our editor is Georges Coulombe, our production assistant
is Stephan Hurtubise, our music is by Shane Turner, and our graphics team is atelierMUSE.
We’re down in the comments below, or you can bring the discussion back over to our
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And we’ll see you next Wednesday. Háws dáng Hl Kíngsaang!