Grammaticality Judgements of Tense by Young Adult Speakers of Shona
Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, Volume 42, Issue 3, 2024, sees an Open Access article titled "Grammaticality Judgements of Tense by Young Adult Speakers of Shona" being published.
Author, Dr McLoddy R. Kadyamusuma's primary interests are in language processing in healthy and neurologically impaired individuals who speak two or more languages (bi/multilingual). "This research line focuses on Shona and English as the main languages of study, and how speakers of these languages interact with their languages specifically in the Zimbabwean context", said Kadyamusuma in an interview with NISC.
The study investigates tense processing in Shona speakers and examines the proficiency of Shona speakers in reading (a) perfectly grammatical sentences of Shona in two different time forms of present and past and whether they could detect (b) sentences with violations to these tense that is supposed to be used in relation to the time reference established by the previous adverb.
"A confluence of factors affects how the Shona-English bilingualism manifests especially regarding how the languages are portrayed and used by individuals. This lens informs this line of research and explores specific language structures and how socio-political factors can easily shape how language is processed by individuals who speak these language", said Kadyamusuma.
The findings from the current study indicate that, overall, Shona speakers found the time reference violations to a recent temporal context more difficult to process than those with a remote past temporal context violated by a present tense.
"Additionally, overall, the young adult Shona speakers’ performance was unexpected when processing Shona sentences under time constraints. The poor performance across the different tested conditions were explained to be as a result of difficulties in processing the sentences under time constraints", said Kadyamusuma.
Ultimately the research shows that time induced difficulties when reading Shona sentences resulted in the failure to consistently detect errors in sentences with grammatical errors, and to accept well-formed sentences. The full research paper is available to read Open Access here.