Thursday 13 March 2025 10:30am to 12:00pm
About
Date & Time: Thursday, 13 March 2025, 10:30–12:00 (GBT) / 19:30–21:00 (JST)
Venue: Room GR-05, English Faculty Building, 9 West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DP & Online
Register for Online Participation: https://forms.gle/fqAA9YE2LEmn3ZsU9
Registration Deadline: Sunday, 9 March (8:59 GBT) / Monday, 10 March (08:59 JST)
The initial state of interlanguage grammars: Investigations of artificial language acquisition by learners with different first languages
John Williams1, Yuyan Xue1, Boping Yuan1, Junya Fukuta2, Takayuki Kimura3, John Matthews2, Makiko Hirakawa2, Ianthi Maria Tsimpli1, and Shigenori Wakabayashi2 (1University of Cambridge, UK; 2 Chuo University; 3Utsunomiya University)
This symposium aims to share insights from a research collaboration project based on the MOU between the Cambridge Language Sciences Interdisciplinary Research Centre and the Chuo University Institute of Cultural Sciences. The research group has investigated the learnability of constraints on a syntactic operation using a semi-artificial language, exerting control over language experience (e.g., input distribution and frequency) and creating artificial languages, ‘Janglish’ and ‘Jainese’ amalgamations of Japanese, English and Chinese with grammatical morphemes modeled on Japanese and lexis taken from English and Chinese, respectively. These morphemes, including case markers, postpositions, and classifiers, function as they do in Japanese, but their forms (sounds/scripts) are unrelated to Japanese. We also created third language with these same morphemes along with Japanese lexis, named ‘JaJa.’