Bricks or Mortar: Which Parts of the Input Does a Second Language Listener Rely on?

Bricks or Mortar: Which Parts of theInput Does a Second Language ListenerRely on?JOHN FIELDUniversity of ReadingReading, England

There is considerable evidence from psycholinguistics that first lan-guage listeners handle function words differently from content words.This makes intuitive sense because content words require the listener toaccess a lexical meaning representation whereas function words do not.A separate channel of processing for functors would enable them to bedetected faster. The question is of importance to our understanding ofsecond language (L2) listening. Because what is extracted from theinput by L2 listeners is generally less than complete, it is useful for theinstructor to know which parts of the signal they are likely to recognize,and which parts are likely to be lost to them. On the one hand, L2listeners might rely heavily on function words because high frequencyrenders them familiar. On the other, they might have difficulty identi-fying function words confidently within a piece of connected speechbecause functors in English are usually brief and of low perceptualprominence. The current study investigated intake by intermediate-level L2 listeners to establish whether function or content words areprocessed more accurately and reported more frequently. It found thatthe recognition of functors fell significantly behind that of lexicalwords. The finding was remarkably robust across first languages andacross levels of proficiency, suggesting that it may reflect the way inwhich L2 listeners choose to distribute their attention.

Grammarians have long found it useful to identify two categories oflexical unit. The distinction is often expressed in terms of a closed

class (of prepositions, determiners, auxiliary verbs, etc.) to which newitems are very rarely added, and an open class (consisting mainly of nouns,verbs, adjectives, and adverbs of manner) which is constantly being ex-panded as new items are coined (Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, & Svartvik,1985, pp. 67–68). A more traditional way of defining the categories is bydistinguishing items which fulfil a largely syntactic function (functionwords) from those which bear lexical meaning (content words). This dis-

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tinction gives rise to grey areas: For example, the preposition in clearlydoes not have the same level of lexical meaning as the word book, but itstill appears in dictionaries and can be demonstrated by a languageteacher. Nevertheless, it is this semantic distinction which is adopted inthe current study, for reasons that will become evident.

A linguistic concept does not necessarily correspond to a psycholin-guistic one. Just because a category or structure is recognized in gram-mar theory, one cannot take it for granted that it has psychological reality,that is, that it plays any part in the way the mind constructs or under-stands utterances. However, within first language (L1) psycholinguistics,a great deal of evidence has accumulated which suggests that functionwords are processed differently from those that bear lexical meaning.Some of the earliest indications came from examples of slips of thetongue, where it was noted that content words are quite often misplaced(rules of word formation → words of rule formation) but that function wordstend not to be. This evidence suggested to some commentators (e.g.,Garrett, 1980) that assembling an utterance demands two distinct pro-cesses, with the speaker first constructing a frame in which certain po-sitions are reserved for the mortar of function words and then insertingmeaning-bearing bricks in the form of nouns, verbs, and adjectives.

Further early evidence (for listening, see Swinney, Zurif, & Cutler,1980) came from patients who had suffered damage to Broca’s area inthe brain as a result of a stroke, an accident, or surgery. Their vocabularystore seemed to remain relatively intact, but access to grammar (includ-ing inflections and function words) was often impaired. This led Bradley(1978) to conclude that the two categories are stored separately in themind and/or accessed in different ways. The symptoms associated withBroca’s aphasia might be the result of damage to a part of the brainwhere function words are grouped or of damage to the route by whichthe individual retrieves these items when needed.

It is also suggestive that infants appear to recognize function wordsquite early in their language development (Shi, Werker, & Cutler, 2006)but do not produce many of them until quite late (Radford, 1990),despite their high frequency. The delay might be interpreted as an in-dication that, as speakers, they need to establish a separate retrievalprocess for this category.

The long-standing assumption that content and function words arestored and processed differently has not gone unchallenged. From testsusing spliced sections of speech, Herron and Bates (1997) concludedthat, though listeners access function words rapidly, they depend uponcontext in order to decode them unambiguously. Segalowitz and Lane(2000) argued that it is not necessary to assume two stores because thehigh frequency of function words will always lead to their being recog-nized more rapidly than most content words. However, the separate

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store view has been supported by recent neurological evidence obtainedfrom brain imaging (e.g., Brown, Hagoort, & ter Keurs, 1999; Münte etal., 2001). The areas of the brain that are associated with function wordprocessing appear to be rather different from those associated with ac-cessing the wider lexicon. In addition, event-related potentials measuringelectrical activity in the brain suggest neurological differences in the waythe two categories are processed (Kutas & Van Petten, 1994, pp. 125–127).

Using two different routes has practical benefits for a listener (orindeed a reader). In order to identify a function word, a simple patternmatch is all that is required; there is no need to gain access to a meaning.The process so far as a content word is concerned is considerably morecomplex. The word might possess not one but a range of potentialsenses, all of which have to be accessed (Swinney, 1979) before one ischosen that accords with the context in which the word appears. So aseparate route for function words might enable them to be identifiedmore rapidly and less ambivalently than content words.

If we assume that content and function words are processed separatelyin this way, then how does a listener, exposed to a group of sounds,manage to determine at the outset which parts of the input are likely tocorrespond to functors and which to content words? Basing their analysison English,1 Grosjean and Gee (1987) suggest that listeners exploit theperceptual difference between stressed syllables, which occur almost ex-clusively in content words (and indeed may even serve as the principalmeans of identifying those words), and unstressed syllables, which oftencorrespond to monosyllabic, weak quality functors. Stressed syllables ini-tiate a lexical search, while unstressed ones lead in the first instance to asimple pattern-matching procedure.

Grosjean and Gee (1987) assume that there are two separate stores,with one list consisting purely of functors and another of both functorsand content words. The first is thus available for a rapid identificationprocess, while the second enables factors such as frequency, multiplemeaning, and contextual constraints to be brought to bear on any de-cision. The consequence is a much faster identification of functionwords.2

It should be stressed that any identification is provisional. Just becausean apparent functor match is achieved, it does not mean that it will besustained by the subsequent search. To give an example, the group

1 The proposal related to English, but many other languages appear to downgrade theprominence of function words in terms of their duration, their loudness, or their vowelquality.

2 By including the entire vocabulary, the second list allows for gradations in the extent towhich words convey “meaning.”

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[ə|vз:td]3 might initially be interpreted as HAVE + past participle of verbbefore being revised when the lexical search reveals that there is no suchverb as erted. Similarly, a decision on a possible functor match would besustained in a sequence like [getə|laf] but would be overruled in asequence such as [|kætəlɒg], once the larger word became available.Current models of listening represent lexical retrieval as involving a formof competition with rival candidates receiving activation according tohow probable they are as a match, that is, according to how well they fitwhat has been heard and to their relative frequency. Competition cantake place across word boundaries, so, halfway through the word cata-logue, potential whole word matches such as catalogue and catapult com-pete with possibilities such as cat + a or cat + of. What gives function wordsa head start, in principle at least, is their high frequency (Segalowitz &Lane, 2000). However, a problem lies in the disproportionately highfrequency of many of them,4 which could lead to their dominating con-tent words in which they are embedded (one thinks of the in weather).Bard (1990, p. 206) suggests that there is a trade-off between the weakperceptibility of most function words, which depresses their activation,and their high frequency.

Like Grosjean and Gee, Cutler (1993) suggests that perceptual cuescan be used by a listener to initiate separate searches, though she prefersto rely on a distinction between strong stressed syllables with full qualityvowels and weak unstressed ones marked by the presence of schwa. Shepoints out that the structure of the English lexicon means that anyfirst-pass association of content words with the former and functionwords with the latter has a high chance of success. Of the strong syllablesin a corpus examined by Cutler & Carter (1987), 86% occurred in openclass words and only 14% in closed-class words. The pattern was reversedfor weak syllables, with 72% in closed-class words and 28% in open-classwords.

Stankler (reported in Cutler, 1993) supported these statistics withpsychological evidence of a link between weak quality and membershipof the functor class. He trained English speakers in an artificial languagewhich observed the same prosodic distinctions as in English, with weakquality items serving grammatical functions and strong quality itemscarrying lexical content. The results were compared with those fromparticipants who learned the same artificial language but with the con-tent–functor distinction random, reversed (strong syllables marking

3 The phonemic transcription in this article follows the conventions of the InternationalPhonetic Alphabet. The examples given are based upon standard southern British English.

4 Of the 100 most frequent items in the spoken British National Corpus (Leech, Rayson, &Wilson, 2001, p. 144), only around 16 are clearly identifiable as open-class words. The wordthe leads the field, with a frequency of 39,605 per million words, with its nearest rival I at29,448. By comparison, the first content word know has a frequency of 5,550 per million.

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function words), or null (all syllables strong). Stankler reported a signif-icant advantage in favour of the version that followed the same distinc-tion as English. The conclusion he drew is that English listeners knowand exploit the connection between vowel quality and membership ofthe two classes.

A rather different slant on how listeners handle input comes fromstudies of verbatim recall. We know that, after a lapse of time, contentwords are remembered more accurately than functors. The most obviousexplanation is that functors decay from memory more quickly once theutterance has been turned into an abstract idea because they are notcentral to the final meaning. But it might also be that any sections of theinput that potentially correspond to function words are awarded lessattention by the listener at the time they are being heard. They areprocessed more shallowly because they are perceptually weaker and lesseasy to decode with confidence. This explanation would correspond toevidence from reading. L1 readers process function words more curso-rily (Haberlandt & Graesser, 1989) and skip them more often (Carpen-ter & Just, 1983). The findings may be partly connected to the shortnessof most functors, but readers have also shown themselves less accuratein crossing out a target letter when it occurs in a function word thanwhen it occurs in a content one (Rosenberg, Zurif, Brownell, Garrett, &Bradley, 1985).

RELEVANCE TO SECOND LANGUAGE (L2) LISTENING

We must now relate these issues to L2 listeners. Many other languagesbesides English distinguish content and function words by means of theirrelative prominence, so learners will often be familiar with the principlefrom their L1. But they still need to recognise the specific cues that markthe difference in English, and to develop an association between cue andword category.

Lexically stressed syllables in English are marked in several ways: bygreater duration, loudness, and pitch, and by possessing full quality vow-els (Laver, 1994, pp. 512–514). Most learners succeed in distinguishingstressed from unstressed syllables quite reliably at an early stage. How-ever, the ability to make a content/functor attribution may depend uponthe overall rhythm of English—perhaps upon the brevity of unstressedsyllables compared to stressed ones. Eastman (1993) produces evidencethat learners face an important obstacle in distinguishing content wordsand functors when their L1 does not resemble English rhythmically. Hesuggests that speakers of what are traditionally called syllable-timed lan-guages are at a disadvantage compared with those who speak stressed-timedlanguages.


Clearly the ability to identify content words confidently is often com-promised by the learner’s limited vocabulary. A great deal depends onhow accurately the word in question is represented in the listener’s mindand how many possible variants of it the listener is able to recognize(Field, 2008b, see chapter 9). L2 listeners constantly need to make al-lowance for the fact that a given string of sounds may not correspond toany of the lexical items that they currently know.

But it is functors that pose the most intriguing questions. On the onehand, they are highly frequent. They are also limited in English toaround 300 single or multiword items. We can assume that the interme-diate-level listener has encountered most of them many times over andhas been able to build up a repertoire of the possible variations to whichthey may be subject. On the other hand, the information in the inputthat signals the possible presence of a function word is usually (becauseof its unstressed status) very brief and of low perceptibility. It is thuspotentially unreliable. Discussing L1 listeners, Shillcock and Bard (1993)point out that the high frequency of function words is counterbalancedby the fact that the uncertain evidence provided by the input may lead usto form matches with a large number of possible words:

As closed-class words are often pronounced as weak syllables, they are . . .likely to have short, centralized vowels or no vowel at all as well as re-duced, imperfectly articulated consonants. The set of lexical competitorsactivated by such poor input could be quite large and yet, because theacoustic evidence is so poor, have no clear front runners. (p. 182)

If this uncertainty obtains with an L1 listener, how much more pro-nounced it must be with an L2 listener—especially one whose phonemevalues in English are shaky.

There is thus a conflict between high frequency/familiarity and lowperceptual evidence. It is of interest to see which of the factors prevailsfor most L2 listeners. The relevance is that a great deal of L2 listening ishighly strategic in nature. In general, listeners succeed in decoding farless of the input than is generally assumed (Field, 2008b, see chapter 15).They are thus quite heavily dependent on compensatory techniques tosupply the words or the concepts that they have not succeeded in iden-tifying. We know very little about the perceptual information that theinexperienced L2 listener draws upon to support these strategic guesses.We know even less about which items within that information are likelyto be reliable and which items listeners should be cautious about trust-ing.

Hence the question addressed in this study: Do function words orcontent words feature more reliably in the bottom-up data that becomesavailable to the listener? Do listeners structure their interpretation of apartially understood piece of spoken input around familiar functors?

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They might do so, not as part of a “mortar-first” approach to syntacticprocessing but simply by virtue of the fact that they know and recognizefunction words and rate them as dependable. This would assist them, asCutler (1993) suggests, to work out where content words begin and end.Just such a procedure has been hypothesized in the early stages of L1acquisition (Christophe, Guasti, Nespor, Dupoux, & van Ooyen, 1997).

Alternatively, do listeners adopt a decoding strategy that is primarilysemantic, and rely more heavily on perceptually reliable information inthe form of lexically stressed syllables that provide cues to meaning-bearing words? Intuitively, this seems to be the more likely—becausemore informative—line of attack. But it is a line of attack fraught withdangers. Listeners may need to (a) allow for the fact that a targetedcontent word is not in their vocabulary at all, (b) access not one but arange of possible senses, and (c) relate those senses to the context inwhich the word appears. In relation to (c), it is important to bear in mindthat the context in question might be incomplete and fragmented be-cause not everything in the utterance has been successfully decoded.

DECODING BY L2 LISTENERS

Relatively few studies have investigated how much of a piece of naturalspeech an L2 listener succeeds in matching to words. The reasons havebeen partly practical: Multiple variables need to be considered, amongthem the sample of speech that is chosen, the familiarity of the speaker’svoice and accent, the listening experience of the participants, and so on.The reasons have also been historical. In the 1980s and early 1990s, therewas a received idea among TESOL practitioners and researchers that thelistener’s ability to map from sounds to words was not of primary impor-tance because any lapses at this lower level could be compensated for bythe use of contextual information. It is only relatively recently (Field,2008a; Lynch, 2006; Vandergrift, 2004) that thinking has moved on andthere has been renewed interest in perceptual processing. Even so, muchof the focus of attention has been on how the phonology of L1 constrainsthe perception of L2 at phoneme level (Strange, 1995).

One way of investigating the decoding of natural speech is to play arecording to a population of L2 listeners and to ask them to transcribewhat they understand. The resulting data can be subjected to erroranalysis and thus provides input to remedial classroom practice. It alsoindicates what linguistic information is available to listeners. A numberof research studies have adopted a transcription method, often with aprimary interest in vocabulary (i.e., content word) recognition. Fishman(1980) concluded from responses obtained in a dictation exercise that


the errors of L2 listeners were not dissimilar to those of L1 listeners. Voss(1984) examined the effects of hesitation and accent on accuracy and onthe types of error made. There were lexis versus syntax studies by Conrad(1983) and Kelly (1991), though the criteria they used for the subse-quent classification of errors are open to challenge. Mack (1988) ex-posed learners to pieces of computer-generated speech and to anoma-lous utterances such as A painted shoulder thawed the misty sill. More re-cently, Bonk (quoted in Pemberton, 2004) traced the relationshipbetween comprehension and the accuracy with which content words aretranscribed, and Pemberton (2004) investigated the decoding of 27Hong Kong listeners, using a carefully designed taxonomy of error types.

A brief look at the results of Voss’s first task indicates that, of 193errors by his 22 high-level German learners, 109 involved function words.However, the figures are not as clearcut as they might appear: Somewords were wrongly reported by nearly all respondents, others by onlyone or two. The data does not indicate the relationship between erro-neous items and those correctly matched or the relative prevalence offunctors and content words in the text. Pemberton’s detailed analysisincluded consideration of the effects of word frequency and word cat-egory on recognition. He reported (pp. 41–42) an unexpectedly lowrecognition rate for high-frequency words, all of them known to theparticipants. He also reported very little difference between recognitionrates for function and content words (respectively, 74% and 79%).

An important aspect of the transcription method adopted by bothVoss and Pemberton is that it permitted participants to rewind as oftenas they wished in order to check their answers. The opportunity forrecursion means that the levels of accuracy and the types of error mustdiffer from those that would obtain in real life. One might postulate thaterrors in situations where only one hearing is possible would be higherthan those recorded by Pemberton and that the ratio between accuratelyreported content and functor words might well be different.

RESEARCH DESIGN

Method: Paused Transcription

The method used in this study therefore required listeners to reportback immediately after hearing the target sections of speech and withoutthe possibility of rewinding. Short sections of only four or five words weretargeted, with a view to limiting possible memory effects. Small-scalepieces of transcription run the risk of directing attention to decoding atword level, thus eliciting a set of processes which do not resemble those

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of a normal listening encounter. A paused transcription method was there-fore adopted. In this paradigm, participants are asked to listen to anauthentic piece of connected speech. Pauses are inserted into the re-cording at irregular intervals; and, whenever a pause occurs, participantsare asked to transcribe the last few words. The rationale is that, for mostof the recording, participants are listening as they would in real life, forlarger-scale meaning. When the pause occurs, the most recently heardwords remain available for report: There is psycholinguistic evidence(Jarvella, 1971) that we briefly retain a verbatim record of the words wehear until the onset of the following clause.

Material

The recording used was from a set of L2 listening comprehensionmaterials (Underwood, 1975). It consisted of an informal interview withthe manager of a cinema, in which he discusses changes in the waycinema is perceived. The text was judged to be culturally neutral andwithin the world experience of all the participants. Most or all of thewords in it were judged to be within their vocabulary range. The sectionsof the text chosen for transcription combined content and functionwords and are shown in Table 1. A minimum of 10 seconds of recordingseparated each section to ensure that higher-level processing took place.

Participants

Nonnative listeners (NNL) were drawn from mixed-nationality classesat an English language school in Cambridge, England. The participantswere mainly in their late teens or early twenties, and had spent only threeweeks in Britain. They were in classes graded as intermediate. Threemembers were later dropped from the sample: One had recorded zeroresponses to all items; one had an entry test score substantially below thatof the rest of the group; and for one, there was no record of an entry test

TABLE 1Sections of Recording Targeted for Transcription

1 which changed each week 8 we’re providing a service2 must be an occasion 9 most of their early years3 comfortable seats, good sound 10 make any money on it4 we’ve lost in the past 11 children having a good time5 been brought up on television 12 the age of forty-eight6 a higher standard of entertainment 13 they’re staying at home7 have been shown to adults 14 middle-aged type of person


score. This left 46 participants, who were divided into two groups of 23on the basis of their scores in the entry test administered by the school.At the time of testing, participants were in the third week of their course;the entry test results were thus sufficiently recent to reflect their knowl-edge of English. The first group (NNL1) comprised those who hadscores ranging from 30–60; the second (NNL2) comprised those whohad scores ranging from 61–80.

The participants spoke a range of L1s. They included Spanish (n =12), German (8), Portuguese (5), Korean (4), Italian (4), Japanese (3),Arabic (2), Czech (2), and Mandarin Chinese (2). The group also in-cluded one speaker each of French, Russian, Albanian, and Hebrew. Theissue of possible variation due to native language is explored in duecourse.

Control groups of native listener (NL) participants were drawn fromYear 10 in two state secondary schools in Cambridge, England. They were

• Group NL1: a set of language learners graded as poorly performing(n = 21)

• Group NL2: a top set of successful language learners (n = 23)

In both cases, the language being learnt was French. Accurate responsesfrom three members of Group NL1 were found to be well below themean; these participants were dropped from the sample, on the assump-tion that they had had writing difficulties with the transcription. This lefta group of 18.

Procedure

Participants were tested in groups in their normal classrooms. Theywere told that they would hear a cassette recording of a man’s voice.Whenever there was a pause in the recording, they were to write the lastfour or five words they had heard. There was a check to ensure that theinstruction had been understood. The general specification “four orfive” was used so as not to introduce additional cognitive demands byencouraging participants to count the words to be transcribed. However,previous experience with the method indicated that, in these circum-stances, participants choose to write entire phrases or clauses, which iswhat happened here.

The recording (with inserted pauses) was played on high quality audioequipment designed for language learning. At each pause, the experi-menter called out a number and participants wrote their transcription inthe appropriate place on an answer sheet. The length of the pauses wasdesigned to ensure that subjects, writing at average speed, could onlyrecord a maximum of about six words. The aim was to prevent them

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from attempting to recall large sections of the text and, in the process,reducing the accuracy of their responses. This expedient also ensuredthat subjects did not have time to review their answers once they hadwritten them down.

RESULTS

Participants’ handwritten responses were transferred to computer,and were classified word by word according to whether an accuratetranscription had been achieved. The attitude to spelling was not pre-scriptive: Orthographic variants were recorded as accurate if they seg-mented a particular item correctly and approximated phonetically to thetarget item. Lexical words which were accurately identified but wronglyinflected were treated as correct answers.

Untranscribed words were classified in three ways. Where no earlierpart of the extract had been transcribed or where the response as awhole consisted of only one word, a blank (–) was recorded. Where anearlier part of the text had been transcribed, an omission (0) was re-corded. A problem was posed by zero responses where the respondent hadnot transcribed the target string at all or had written words which felloutside the section in question. If it could be shown that these responsesresulted exclusively from inability to identify words, it would have beenlegitimate to include them in the figures for errors. However, they mightequally well have resulted from larger scale failures of processing relatingto the whole target section or to the wider context. Zero answers weretherefore discounted, and accurate transcriptions were calculated as apercentage of those responses where a minimum of one word was writ-ten. The figures quoted in succeeding sections thus reflect the probabil-ity of a response being correct where a response was given.

Function words in the target items were identified by reference to thespecification in Quirk et al. (1985, pp. 67–72), but the adverb particle upwas included and pronoun + verb contractions were treated as singleitems. Though strictly a determiner in its context here, the word most wastreated as a content word. The compound adjective middle-aged wascounted as two items, and the numeral forty-eight was omitted. This pro-cedure resulted in a set of 30 content and 29 function words across the14 items. Of the content words, however, three possessed more than twosyllables, giving them a distinct advantage in terms of length.5 Theselonger items (comfortable, television, entertainment) were excluded, leaving27 content words.

5 Since lexical recognition was the goal, the -ing inflection was discounted: The stem inproviding is treated as disyllabic and the stems in having and staying as monosyllabic.


Recognition Across Groups

The percentage of words accurately transcribed was calculated foreach participant by word type (content vs. functor). From these figures,means were calculated for each of the four groups. The results are shownin Figure 1 below.

Results for Group NL2 represent a ceiling effect unsurprising in tran-scriptions in one’s L1: functor, M = 94.76 (SD = 5.79); content, M = 95.65(SD = 7.62). Even Group NL1, identified as poorly performing languagelearners, achieved mean accuracies of above 80%, though there was astriking difference between their ability to transcribe content words andthat for functors: functor, M = 84.03 (SD = 13.95); content, M = 91.11 (SD= 6.54).

Two main findings emerge. Firstly, despite the greater frequency offunction words, their recognition rate is considerably lower than that forcontent words in three of the four groups. Secondly, the disparity be-tween the two types of word was relatively consistent across the two NNLgroups (17.28 for NNL1, and 19.64 for NNL2). The gap only begins tonarrow with the first of the NL groups. A series of t tests was used tomeasure the significance of the differences between function and con-tent word recognition; the results are shown in Table 2. The differencewas significant in the cases of both NNL groups; it was borderline in thecase of the weak language learner group NL1.

To determine the variation between the recognition patterns of the

FIGURE 1Content and functor recognition across four groups.

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lower level NNL group (NNL1) and those of the higher level (NNL2),the differential between percentage content-word recognition and per-centage function-word recognition was calculated for each participant. At test indicated no significant difference between the groups: t(44) =0.54, n.s. A similar t test comparing differentials between the NL groupsalso failed to achieve significance: t(39) = 1.80, n.s.

First Language

An uncontrolled variable of this study lay in the mix of L1s within thepopulation sampled. The largest native-language groups were thereforeinvestigated independently. These were the groups of Spanish speakers(12 participants) and German speakers (8 participants). An importantconsideration was the fact that one of these languages (German) closelyresembles English rhythmically, whereas the other does not.6

Level of English was controlled. From the 12 Spanish-speaking par-ticipants, eight were chosen whose scores on the school’s entry test werewithin one point of each of the eight German participants. Figure 2displays the differences in word recognition between the two subgroups.Mean percentage recognition by German speakers was higher at 78.75(11.57) for content words and 61.46 (6.96) for functors. This comparedwith 53.12 (20.34) for content words and 41.14 (17.74) for functors forthe Spanish speakers. But in both cases, recognition of function wordsfell well behind that of content words; indeed, it did so to a greaterextent in the case of the German speakers. A t test on the content–functor differentials across the two language groups indicated no signif-icant difference: t(15) = 0.74, n.s. This result suggests that, in identifyingweakly stressed items, the Germans did not derive any major advantagefrom the metrical similarities between L1 and L2.

Results were then analysed for three other language groups, each

6 Many commentators regard the traditional stress-timed versus syllable-timed distinctionwith distrust (see, e.g., Roach, 1982). However, there are marked rhythmic differencesbetween German and Spanish attributable, at least in part, to the prevalence of closed andopen syllables and to differences in the relative timing of weak and strong syllables (Del-attre, 1965, Dauer, 1983). In both instances, German resembles English more closely.

TABLE 2Significance of Differences in Content–Functor Recognition

Group Statistic Significance

Nonnative Listener Group 1 t(22) = 5.77 p < 0.001Nonnative Listener Group 2 t(22) = 6.88 p < 0.001Native Listener Group 1 t(17) = 2.05 p = 0.056Native Listener Group 2 t(22) = 0.64 n.s.


consisting of four or five individuals at similar levels: These were speakersof Korean, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese. Although the small numberof participants means that the results are less reliable, interesting paral-lels were observed between the content–functor relationship in theselanguages and that for speakers of Spanish and German (see Figure 3).In most cases, mean percentage recognition of functors was approxi-mately 20% lower for functors than for content words; the exception wasItalian, where the gap widened to 29.58%.

Although these results should be treated with some caution because ofthe small number of participants in each nationality group, they indicatethat greater difficulty in identifying functors in the experimental text wasnot a function of the participant’s native language. The participantsfeatured in this study represent between them two languages sometimesbroadly characterized as stress-based (German and Brazilian Portuguese)and three broadly characterized as syllable-based (Spanish, Italian, andKorean).

Level of English

The evidence reported so far appears to indicate that the accurateidentification of function words remains a problem even at higher levelsof L2 proficiency. The two NNL groups were combined and evidence wassought of a relationship between individual scores on the school’s entrytest and accuracy in transcribing the target sections. A Pearson product-

FIGURE 2Mean percentage recognition across two first language groups.

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moment coefficient suggested a statistically significant relationship be-tween level and content-word recognition (r(44) = 0.64) and a weakerbut significant relationship between level and functor recognition (r(44) = 0.58). However, as Figure 4 indicates, large differentials in recog-nition of the two categories continue in evidence even at the higherlevels. Figure 5 presents the same data in the form of a scattergram. Theaccuracy with which content words were identified seems to correlate

FIGURE 4Functor–content differential by proficiency level.

FIGURE 3Content–functor accuracy across five first languages.


quite closely with level as defined by the entry test. Clearly, an increasein oral vocabulary might be expected to lead to greater recognition oflexical items. However, the ability to identify function words would ap-pear to be subject to considerable individual variation at all levels.

DISCUSSION

The results of this study indicate that English function words areidentified significantly less accurately by L2 listeners than are contentwords. The finding was demonstrated across a group of 46 learners ofmixed L1s and continued to hold true when participants were controlledfor L1. Difficulty in recognising function words also appeared to beindependent of level of English. Certain learners rated as having a highlevel of overall proficiency continued to exhibit large differentials be-tween their ability to identify content words and their ability to identifyfunctors. This differs markedly from the results recorded by Pemberton(2004), who noted relatively little variation between the levels of contentand function words in his data. What distinguishes this study from Pem-berton’s is that the participants were not able to listen recursively to therecording. The present data may thus be more representative of how anL2 listener copes with a piece of natural connected speech in a real-lifesituation.

The challenge facing L2 listeners was earlier characterized in terms ofa conflict between, on the one hand, the high frequency and limited

FIGURE 5Scattergram: Distribution of recognition across proficiency levels.

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numbers of function words and, on the other, their low perceptual sa-liency, including their brevity, and (thanks to the ubiquitous schwa)their relatively indeterminate phonetic identity. It would appear fromthe findings that what weighs most with the listener, regardless of level,are perceptual considerations.

But we need to explore this conclusion in a little more detail. Onepossibility may lie in learners’ unfamiliarity with English phonology: inparticular, their difficulty in distinguishing syllables in terms of stress. Butone would then assume that higher level learners would show a greaterfacility in identifying function words than lower level ones, given theirgreater exposure to the target language. This was not shown to be thecase. A second explanation (following Eastman, 1993) might be found inthe L1’s rhythmic characteristics: It might be that learners with certaintypes of L1 are not attuned to discriminating between weak and strongsyllables on the grounds, say, of duration or of vowel quality. But, again,the evidence did not support such an interpretation. Learners with an L1that can be loosely characterized as stress-based were found to have noadvantage over those with other types of L1 prosody. (The one counter-indication came from the small Italian group).

Perception clearly plays a part. We cannot ignore the difficulty ofmaking accurate phoneme matches in a foreign language when thesyllables are short and uninformative. But the results obtained suggestthat there is a second contributory factor: namely, the way in which theL2 listener, regardless of level or L1, chooses to distribute his or herattention. An earlier section mentioned evidence that L1 users (espe-cially readers) lend a reduced level of attention to function words. It isclearly more efficient for an L1 listener to focus primarily on the parts ofan utterance which are likely to bear meaning. The same logic applies inthe case of an L2 listener, but there are additional considerations. Lis-tening to a foreign language is, even at higher levels of proficiency, acognitively demanding activity. Working memory is strictly limited incapacity (Gathercole & Baddeley, 1993), and, faced with heavy task de-mands, language users have to choose where best to direct their atten-tion. In these circumstances, the L2 listener opts for the more salientstressed syllables, not simply because content words contribute more tothe construction of meaning but also because stressed syllables are moredependable (Bond, 1999). Whereas L1 listeners manage to process func-tors peripherally because they are so extremely familiar with them (seethe results for the NL groups), the L2 listeners do not have the capacityto do so. Their solution is to go for the bricks and let the mortar lookafter itself.

The results of this study thus point to a model of L2 listening in whichdecoding relies primarily upon matching stretches of the speech signalto meaning-bearing items of vocabulary. They confirm evidence re-


ported elsewhere (Field, 2004) of a strategic approach to L2 decodingthat appears to be driven by lexical search, even sometimes at the ex-pense of accepting a match that is approximate. They also accord closelywith VanPatten’s proposal (1994) that the process of making sense of anL2 is principally driven in the early stages of learning by meaning ratherthan by form.

APPLICATIONS TO PRACTICE

One of the goals of this study was to provide information for thelistening instructor. If we are to train learners to make sense of partiallyunderstood utterances, it is clearly useful to have some notion of the rawmaterial with which the learner is working. The evidence suggests thatthe linguistic foundation on which learners base hypotheses about aspeaker’s meaning is likely to consist principally of content words, withthe number increasing as knowledge of L2 improves. Function words arelikely to be missing or only approximately matched, even among somehigher level learners.

These results have implications for the way we instruct learners inlistening strategies. In the early stages of listening development, learnersshould be asked to build a general and sometimes approximate meaningrepresentation on the basis of the more prominent content words in thetext. The current practice of listening out for key words would seem tobe justified. But as listening competence improves, instructors mightmove on from meanings to forms: asking learners to attempt to infer theprecise words that they had failed to decode (not least among them theabsent functors). If, as has been suggested, the inaccurate reporting offunctors reflects a bias in the way learners choose to distribute theirattention, then we may have to reconcile ourselves to the fact that func-tors may only ever be decoded in an indeterminate way, even at laterlevels of L2 proficiency. In that case, it makes sense to train learners toinfer post hoc what was most likely there. A further line of developmentwould be to encourage learners to shift their attention from single,isolated content words to the larger chunks of language within whichthey regularly occur (Wray, 2002). Thus, one might be satisfied at lowerlevels with a procedure that identified two occurrences of the word timein quick succession and inferred the likelihood of the sequence from timeto time, but at later stages one would expect the entire formula to beproduced on a first pass.

The listeners in this study clearly had their priorities right. If one hasto choose what to focus on, the ability to identify the meaning-bearingcomponents of an utterance clearly outweighs the benefits of recognis-

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ing how they are linked syntactically. Nevertheless, fine distinctions ofmeaning can sometimes depend on functor recognition: Compare I’mlooking at the photos with I’m looking for the photos. It therefore makes senseto include function words in the kind of focused listening practice thatsome commentators recommend, alongside other phonetically problem-atic features of the spoken language, such as assimilation, resyllabifica-tion, or elision (Field, 2003, 2008b). In this kind of small-scale awareness-raising exercise, a set of (say) 10 sentences containing weak quality re-alisations of functors might be dictated for transcription.

The issues that have been raised have implications that extend beyondthe teaching of listening. A general presumption exists in TESOL thatthe language taught in the classroom will sooner or later be reinforcedby the language encountered outside. Exposure to English speakers inperson or through film, TV, or podcast affords learners multiple ex-amples of natural language in use. The principal requirement forprogress, according to many commentators, is that learners should “no-tice” the form of words that native speakers use or “notice the gap”between their own formulations and the standard one (Schmidt & Frota,1986). The noticing hypothesis is a persuasive one, but it does not allowfully for possible divergences between what features in the input andwhat becomes intake to the listener. In particular, it does not allow forwhat has been raised in this study: the possibility that L2 listener atten-tion is directed preferentially toward certain parts of the input and nottoward others. If we accept this view of events, then it means that manyof the less perceptually prominent parts of what learners hear in casuallistening may not be present for them or may only be represented intheir minds in an indeterminate way. In practice, the intake extracted bythe learner may be lacking in precisely those elements which mightsupport the development of a complete native-like system of syntax:evidence of inflections and verb forms and of the contribution of func-tion words to larger syntactic patterns. This is an issue that clearly meritsfurther consideration.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I put on record my gratitude to the staff and students at Eurocentre Cambridge andespecially to the previous principal, Eryl Griffiths, for assistance with this study. I alsoextend sincere thanks to the staff and pupils at two Cambridge secondary schools,Manor Community College and the Netherhall School, for their support and coop-eration.

THE AUTHOR

John Field teaches psycholinguistics and child language development at the Univer-sity of Reading, England, and cognitive approaches to second language acquisition at


Cambridge University, England. His interests lie in applying psycholinguistic theoryto issues in L2 learning, especially listening. He is committed to making psycholin-guistics available to a wider audience through his writing and teaching.

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Documents

Bricks or Mortar: Which Parts of the Input Does a Second Language Listener Rely on?