教養学部報
第669号 
<時に沿って> 言語を理解するには / To understand languages
宮本エジソン正
この文章を読んでいるとき、紙または画面上には「くねくね」した記号のようなものしかありません。その記号が、どのように文字、単語、文、そして抽象概念に置き換わっていくのでしょうか？
If you look intently at this text, you will notice it is only a bunch of squiggles. How do we process squiggles into letters, words, sentences, abstract concepts?
This process is so automatic and fast that researchers like myself often have to investigate what happens when something goes wrong. For example, writers sometimes produce agreement mistakes like in the sentence in (1) below, even in carefully proofread texts.
(1) The diamond in the necklace were worth a thousand dollars.
Readers rarely notice the number mismatch between the noun "diamond" and the verb "were." Still, they are slower to read such ungrammatical sentences, suggesting that something did go wrong during processing.
Number agreement is often redundant. Ignore it and you can still understand the sentence. So, the reading slowdown is interesting. It seems that agreement is something fundamental in human languages. It triggers an unconscious sub-process that cannot be sidestepped. If so, can we detect such slowdowns in readers whose native language (L1) is not English?
There are two camps in this debate. In what I call the "L1 as a cage" camp, your L1 limits how far you can go learning a second language (L2). So, if your L1 does not have number agreement (as in Chinese, Japanese and Thai), you will never be able to process number agreement fluently in an L2.
For the "L1 as a trampoline" camp, your L1 is the starting point for learning L2. You tweak your L1 knowledge to accommodate and approximate the L2 you are learning. The more similar L1 and L2 are, the fewer the tweaks, thus the faster the learning. As L2 proficiency improves, we should start detecting slowdowns in sentences like (1).
Experimental results in the 1990s supported the cage view as no slowdown was detected when readers' L1 was Chinese or Japanese. But later results have increasingly favored the trampoline view. For example, my collaborators (in Japan, Taiwan and Thailand) and I have found that sensitivity to agreement mismatch increases along with L2 proficiency.
My take-home message to you: Your L1 is not a limiting factor. It is your starting point. You just need to work on it toward L2 fluency!
（言語情報科学／英語）
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