PhD project In natural communication, people use information (cues) balancing between the goal to be understood and cognitive recourses available. This is reflected in language use (a corpus) in the distribution of cues which differ in their nature and in relative strengths, even more so across languages. How do our experiences with cues in the first language affect cue use in a later acquired language? To address the question, I focus on Russian and Swedish sentences containing event descriptions.
To understand event descriptions, people need to efficiently process cues to the roles participants play in the event. Russian and Swedish allow placing the affected participant in the sentence-initial position where the actor is most expected, e.g., "Det gillar jag" – it love I (lit.). The interplay of various cues helps to process this less expected order. But differences in the interplay in Russian and Swedish may be hard to grasp for Russian-Swedish learners. I analyse and predict the differences and difficulties using the distributional corpus, computational, and experimental methods.
Experiences we have in life influence how we process information. I aim to understand how our experiences with the first language (L1) Russian influence the use of helpful information (cues) in the third language (L3) Swedish by examining sentences like (1) ‘Книгу выбрала я’ – ‘Boken valde jag’ and (2) ‘Я выбрала книгу’ – ‘Jag valde boken’ (the book chose I and I chose the book, lit.). Previous research has shown that in Russian and Swedish, cues to participants’ roles in such sentences may differ in their nature, e.g., in (1) only Russian marks the accusative case in the noun ending -у, but also similar cues may have different strengths, e.g., that inanimate books cannot choose is potentially a stronger cue in Swedish than Russian. Finding and systematically analysing these crosslinguistic differences in using cues will help understand the general tendencies in human communication and show crucial crosslinguistic differences that can create difficulties for Russian-Swedish learners.
My research includes three studies. Study 1 analyses the distribution of relevant discourse (e.g., whether a participant contains discourse new or given/old information) and local (e.g., case marking) cues to participant role assignment in a Russian corpus. Based on that, in Study 2, I will model probabilistic cue use in real-time Russian processing and compare the model’s predictions for cognitive difficulties to those from the existing Swedish model. Finally, Study 3 will test the predicted difficulties that Russian-(English)-Swedish learners may have in a Swedish production and comprehension experiment. I will also examine the effects of cognitive abilities (e.g., working memory) and L3 learning context. Such multi-method investigation will present a high-resolution puzzle of information use not only in our first but also second or third language.
