Ewa Dąbrowska - Selected Publications#
1. Llompart, Miquel and Ewa Dąbrowska (2023). “Foreign” language aptitude predicts individual differences in native grammatical proficiency. Linguistics, 61(5), 1165-1193.
“Foreign” language aptitude is widely believed to be relevant only for late second language (L2) learning and not related to first language (L1) acquisition, which is assumed to rely on implicit learning mechanisms. This paper presents two studies which reveal robust relationships between language aptitude and L1 grammatical proficiency which was remarkably consistent across different measures grammatical knowledge and which was considerably stronger than the relationships typically observed in L2 research. These results challenge the widely held view that there is a “fundamental difference” between native language acquisition and late second language learning and suggest that explicit learning plays an important role in the former.
2. Dąbrowska, Ewa, Esther Pascual, Beatriz Macias-Gomez-Estern and Miquel Llompart (2023) Literacy-related differences in morphological productivity: A nonce-word study. Frontiers in Psychology 14.
3. Dąbrowska, Ewa, Esther Pascual and Beatriz Macias-Gomez-Estern (2022) Literacy improves comprehension of object relatives. Cognition 224: 104958.
These two papers present experiments investigating productivity with past tense inflections and comprehension of relative clauses in adult illiterate speakers of Spanish, and comparing them with those of literates. This work is ground-breaking: there is virtually no research on the morphosyntactic abilities of illiterates. The studies revealed very large individual differences in performance, as well as vast effects of literacy which cannot be explained away by appealing to linguistically irrelevant performance factors. These results provide the strongest evidence to date challenging one of the dogmas of generative linguistics, namely the claim that native speakers converge on the same grammar, as well as evidence suggesting that experience with written language supports the acquisition of core areas of grammar. Both studies have already attracted attention: for example, (2) had 934 views and downloads in the first 8 months after publication.
4. Dąbrowska, Ewa, Laura Becker and Luca Miorelli (2020) Is adult second language acquisition defective? Frontiers in Psychology 11: 1839. DOI 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01839.
This paper shows that the vast differences in grammatical knowledge between late second language learners and native speakers reported in many studies are, to a large extent, attributable to the use of unrepresentative samples and tasks and grammatical structures that disadvantage second language learners. When these factors are controlled for, there is much more overlap between the groups than reported in previous studies. Given that late learners have had much less experience in the L2 than early learners and native speakers, these results indicate that adults are, if anything, more efficient learners than children.
Three years after publication, this paper already has 25 thousand views and downloads (more than 98% of all papers published in all Frontiers journals).
5. Dąbrowska, Ewa (2020). Language as a phenomenon of the third kind. Cognitive Linguistics 31: 213-229.
This paper examines the tension between language as a social phenomenon (i.e., a set of norms shared by a community of speakers) and as a cognitive phenomenon (the mental representations and processes that make language use possible) by demonstrating that some patterns which are arguably present in a language at the community level are not explicitly represented in most speakers’ minds. It is argued that such situations are possible because speakers may represent “the same” knowledge at different levels of abstraction: while a few may have extracted an abstract generalization, others approximate their behaviour by relying on memorised exemplars or lexically specific patterns.
6. Dąbrowska, Ewa (2019) Experience, aptitude and individual differences in language attainment: A comparison of L1 and L2 speakers. Language Learning 69 S1: 72-100.
This paper provides strong evidence against the fundamental difference and the critical period hypotheses by showing that (1) when compared with a representative sample of native speakers (i.e., not just highly educated speakers) many late second language learners score within the native speaker range -- and, in some cases, well above the native mean -- on tasks assessing knowledge of grammar, vocabulary and collocations; (2) the largest group differences are observed on collocations (an aspect of linguistic knowledge which is idiosyncratic and therefore must be learned from the input) rather than grammar; (3) individual differences in linguistic knowledge are associated with similar non-linguistic predictors. The paper has 55 cites on Google Scholar.
7. Dąbrowska, Ewa (2018) Experience, aptitude and individual differences in native language ultimate attainment. Cognition 178, 222-235.
This paper challenges the widely held view that native speakers of a language, while differing widely in their lexical knowledge, converge on the same grammar, and that grammatical knowledge depends entirely on implicit learning and is independent of intelligence. It shows that individual differences in grammatical attainment are comparable to those observed for vocabulary and collocations, and, furthermore, that there are robust correlations between explicit reasoning about language and nonverbal IQ on the one hand and the ability to use grammatical cues in comprehension on the other. This suggests that L1 acquisition involves explicit mechanisms as well as implicit learning. The paper has 89 cites on Google Scholar.
8. Dąbrowska, Ewa (2015) What exactly is Universal Grammar, and has anyone seen it? Frontiers in Psychology 6: 852. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00852.
This is a critical review of arguments that have been put forward as evidence for an innate Universal Grammar, arguing that they are based on premises which are either false or unsubstantiated. 184 cites on Google Scholar; 338 thousand views and downloads – more than 99% of all papers published in all Frontiers articles.
9. Dąbrowska, Ewa (2014) Recycling utterances: A speaker’s guide to sentence processing. Cognitive Linguistics 25: 617-653.
Previous work (e.g. Dąbrowska and Lieven 2005, Lieven et al. 2003) has demonstrated that the utterances children produce can be derived by superimposing and juxtaposing lexically specific chunks. This paper shows that such a “recycling” account can also explain adults’ ability to produce fluent speech in real time. Importantly, different speakers can produce the same utterances using different chunks. This finding has profound implications for theories of language acquisition and processing as well as for linguistic theory. 96 cites on Google Scholar.
10. Dąbrowska, Ewa (2012) Different speakers, different grammars: Individual differences in native language attainment. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 2: 219-253.
This is an invited keynote article summarizing research on individual differences in the grammatical abilities of native speakers. Together with peer commentaries by leading researchers in bilingualism and psycholinguistics (David Birdsong, Robert DeKeyser, Nick Ellis, Pamela A. Hadley & Matthew Rispoli, Jan H. Hulstijn, Eric Pakulak, Colin Phillips, Eric Reuland, Tom Roeper, Petra Schulz, Irina Sekerina, Ludovica Serratrice, Richard Sparks, and Anne Vainikka & Martha Young-Scholten), it makes up a special issue of the journal. 373 cites on Google Scholar.
