research | Svetlana Vetchinnikova

Individual variation

Usage-based approaches see language as an inventory of patterns learned from exposure. Since everyone’s exposure is different, personal inventories should vary as a function of usage.

Already in my book, I studied second language learners as separate individuals by matching their language use to their own language exposure. In Vetchinnikova (2017), I conceptualized the relationship between the cognitive and the communal levels of language representation using complex systems and operationalized it with corpus data. The latest paper asks whether frequent repetition in individual usage leads to idiosyncratic entrenchment and reanalysis. It uses multilevel regression to model constructional change over time at different levels of schematicity within a personal corpus of language use.

Vetchinnikova, Svetlana. (forthcoming). Idiosyncratic entrenchment: Tracing change in constructional schematicity with nested random effects. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory. [pdf]

Vetchinnikova, Svetlana & Turo Hiltunen. 2020. ELF and Language Change at the Individual Level. In Anna Mauranen & Svetlana Vetchinnikova (eds.), Language Change: The Impact of English as a Lingua Franca, 205–233. Cambridge University Press.

Vetchinnikova, Svetlana. 2019. Phraseology and the Advanced Language Learner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Vetchinnikova, Svetlana. 2017. On the relationship between the cognitive and the communal: A complex systems perspective. In Filppula, Markku, Juhani Klemola, Anna Mauranen & Svetlana Vetchinnikova (eds.), Changing English: Global and local perspectives (Topics in English Linguistics), 277-310. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. [pdf]

Perceptual chunking

How do we process continuous speech given that our memory capacity is limited?

In this project, led by Anna Mauranen and Satu Palva, we extracted 195 short speech excerpts from linguistic corpora and played them to linguistically naïve listeners. While listening, they intuitively marked chunk boundaries in accompanying transcripts through a custom-built tablet application, ChunkitApp. In Vetchinnikova et al. (2022), we examined the validity of the paradigm by measuring obtained inter-rater agreement with percent agreement, Fleiss’ kappa, and permutation-based methods. In Anurova et al. (2023) we inserted silent pauses where listeners’ agreement on chunk boundaries or non-boundaries was statistically significant and played them to a second group, scanning their brain activity with MEEG. We found that a pause inserted within a chunk elicited a biphasic emitted potential while one at a chunk boundary elicited a Closure Positive Shift (Steinhauer et al., 1999). In Vetchinnikova et al. (2023), we annotated all spaces between every two words for pause duration, prosodic boundary strength, clausal syntactic structure, chunk duration and bigram surprisal, and entered each as a predictor of chunk boundary perception in logistic regression models with random effects for listeners and excerpts. The results showed that listeners not only use all available cues but also vary in their cue preference within and across excerpts suggesting that cue degeneracy and syntagmatic redundancy make language robust to listener and speaker variation. Also, the direction of the surprisal effect suggested that perceptual chunking is distinct from usage-based chunking.

Vetchinnikova, Svetlana, Alena Konina, Nitin Williams, Nina Mikušová & Anna Mauranen. 2023. Chunking up speech in real time: linguistic predictors and cognitive constraints. Language and Cognition 15(3). 453–479. [pdf]

Vetchinnikova, Svetlana, Alena Konina, Nitin Williams, Nina Mikušová & Anna Mauranen. 2022. Perceptual chunking of spontaneous speech: Validating a new method with non-native listeners. Research Methods in Applied Linguistics 1(2). 100012.

Anurova, Irina, Svetlana Vetchinnikova, Aleksandra Dobrego, Nitin Williams, Nina Mikusova, Antti Suni, Anna Mauranen & Satu Palva. 2022. Event-related responses reflect chunk boundaries in natural speech. NeuroImage 255. 119203.

Vetchinnikova, Svetlana, Anna Mauranen & Nina Mikušová. 2017. ChunkitApp: Investigating the relevant units of online speech processing. In INTERSPEECH 2017 – 18th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, August 20–24, Stockholm, Sweden, Proceedings, 811-812.

Language learning

Phraseology is often thought of as an anomaly and a headache for language learners. However, both our cognition and research methodologies available make us focus on just one end of the scale, fairly fixed, conventional multi-word units. Here their special status and any divergence from the standard form are clearly evident. What happens at the other end of the scale? How much and what kind of variability does phraseological patterning tolerate?

In my book, I adopted a Sinclairian perspective on the phraseological tendency of language and applied it to recurring patterns in second language use. Importantly, I sought to separate the idiom principle from nativelike selection and focus on mere recurrence and co-occurrence instead. Avoiding direct comparisons between native and non-native speakers, I advocated a within-subject design which does not presuppose convergence on the same patterns across individuals. For each participant of the study, I collected an individual corpus of language use, a matching individual corpus of language exposure and a set of responses to a psycholinguistic task. This research design allowed me to trace meaning-shift units as they were learned from exposure, used in individual language output and processed in the mind intra- rather than inter-individually.

Vetchinnikova, Svetlana. 2019. Phraseology and the Advanced Language Learner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Vetchinnikova, Svetlana. 2015. Usage-based recycling or creative exploitation of the shared code? The case of phraseological patterning Journal of English as a Lingua Franca 4(2), 223-252.

Language change

I co-edited two collections of papers which brought together both eminent and junior scholars from World Englishes, language history, typology, cognitive linguistics, language contact, sociolinguistics, and English as a lingua franca in the study of the current developments in English.

Mauranen, Anna & Svetlana Vetchinnikova (eds.). 2020. Language Change: The impact of English as a Lingua Franca. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Filppula, Markku, Juhani Klemola, Anna Mauranen & Svetlana Vetchinnikova (eds.). 2017. Changing English: Global and local perspectives (Topics in English Linguistics).Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Development of methods

In Vetchinnikova et al. (2022), we developed statistical techniques for assessing statistical significance of crowdsourced chunk boundaries.

In Vetchinnikova, Mauranen and Mikušová (2017), we describe the first version of a tablet application ChunkitApp which is designed to collect perceived chunk boundaries in listening to natural speech. ChunkitApp 2.0 is now freely available.

In Hynninen, Pietikäinen and Vetchinnikova (2017), we examined the flagging of code-switches in the ELFA corpus. We interpreted code-switching as a language phenomenon a speaker perceives to be potentially problematic for the hearer. According to the distributional hypothesis in corpus linguistics, items occurring with similar accompanying co-text are likely to be functionally similar. Capitalizing on this idea, we used flagging as the co-text of code-switching to identify other language phenomena that can be perceived as potentially problematic for the hearer.

Hynninen, Niina, Kaisa Pietikäinen & Svetlana Vetchinnikova (authors listed in alphabetical order) 2017. Multilingualism in English as a lingua franca: Flagging as an indicator of perceived acceptability and intelligibility. In Nurmi, Arja, Tanja Rütten & Päivi Pahta (eds.), Are there monolingual corpora? Challenging the myth, 95-126. Leiden; Boston: Brill.