UCD Irish Institute for Chinese Studies
Public Lecture Series/57th Confucius PhD Forum
Categorization of cues in L2 input and their implications for L2 acquisition
Speaker: Professor Boping Yuan, University of Cambridge
Time: 6-7pm, Thursday 6 March 2025
Venue: 004 Theatre, UCD Confucius Institute for Ireland
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It is generally agreed that cues in the target language input are crucial for triggering all necessary feature reconfigurations in second language (L2) grammars. However, cues necessary for L2 feature reconfiguration can be obscured as a result of L1 influence and may vary with regard to their robustness and detectability in the input. The main question asked in this talk is to what extent different types of cues in the input can affect the success, failure, indeterminacy or delay in the acquisition of certain linguistic features in L2. This question will be addressed with L2 Chinese and L2 English data. L2 grammars are examined and analysed on the basis of comparisons and contrasts of features between the L1 and the target language and whether features that are absent or different in the L1 grammar can be acquired in L2 grammars. Attempts will be made in the talk to categorize cues in the input into different types on the basis of their saliency and robustness in the target language input, and they will be labelled as macro-cues, micro-cues, nano-cues. In addition, the case of no cue in the input will be discussed as well. The categorization of cues will be argued to have pedagogical implications for L2 teaching.
Boping Yuan is Professor Emeritus in Chinese Language and Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. He continues to be a PhD supervisor at Cambridge and Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. He is currently also a Distinguished Professor in Linguistics at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. His research interests are in linguistic approaches to second/third language acquisition, particularly in non-native language acquisition of Chinese and English. He has recently developed interests in bilingualism and aphasia and is involved in a joint project in this area at SJTU. He is the editor-in-chief of Journal of Second Language Studies (John Benjamins), and has published numerous articles in internationally prestigious journals, such as Language, Linguistics, Second Language Research, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, etc. His forthcoming monograph Interlanguage Grammars of Mandarin Chinese is going to be published by Cambridge University Press in May 2025.
