Higher sem. Biling. Pia Järnefelt: The L1 and L2 processing and interpretation of Swedish discourse

Higher seminar in Bilingualism. The L1 and L2 processing and interpretation of Swedish discourse particles. Pia Järnefelt, Uppsala University, Department of Scandinavian Languages.

Seminar

Date:

Tuesday 29 April 2025

Time:

15.00 – 16.30

Discourse particles are used to convey speaker attitudes and pragmatic information that guides the listener’s interpretation of the speaker’s utterances. Discourse particles anchor sentences in context by referring to information that is not necessarily explicitly stated, such as common ground, visual context, or previously stated facts. They do not add propositional value to sentences, but rather operate on existing content words in order to facilitate the interpretation of utterances (Loureda et al., 2022). They are, however, extremely polysemous and can have diametrically different meanings depending on context. They are highly frequent in everyday language and notoriously hard for L2 learners to acquire (Hogeweg et al., 2016).

I will present data from my doctoral thesis, where I have used a novel Visual World paradigm experiment (Tanenhaus et al., 1995) to investigate the Swedish discourse particles ju, nog, egentligen and faktiskt. In two different eye tracking experiments, L1 and L2 speakers (in total, 85 L1 speakers and 84 L2 speakers) were tested. In addition to the eye tracking experiment, a Cloze test that measures DP proficiency was distributed to all participants. 

The data from the first eye tracking experiment, with egentligen and faktiskt, show differences between how L1 and L2 speakers process and interpret the particles, both in terms of offline interpretations and online measures such as gaze patterns, reaction times and pupillometry. A large variability for L1 speakers was found, and participants used three different strategies to interpret and process the most difficult particle egentligen. These results are taken to reflect a higher cognitive load that is induced by the ambiguity introduced by egentligen. 

Preliminary results from the study on ju and nog show that these do not affect the offline interpretation of the sentences for either L1 or L2 speakers, but analysis of the online measures remains and will shed further light on how these semantically bleached particles affect processing. The study contributes new knowledge about the processing and interpretation of discourse particles to the fields of L1 and L2 pragmatics.

 

References

Hogeweg, L., de Hoop, H., Ramachers, S., van der Slik, F., & Wottrich, V. (2016). The L2-acquisition of the German particle doch. IRAL-International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 54(3), 201–227.

Loureda, Ó., Fernández, I. R., Cruz, A., & Rudka, M. (2022). 2 Principles of Discourse Marking: An experimental approach of general and contrastive perspectives. Discourse Markers in Interaction: From Production to Comprehension, 376, 17.

Tanenhaus, M. K., Spivey-Knowlton, M., Eberhard, K., & Sedivy, J. (1995). Integration of visual and linguistic information during spoken language comprehension. Science, 268, 1632–1634.

Pia Järnefelt

About the Higher seminar in Research on Bilingualism