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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Performance in Knowledge Assessment Tests from the Perspective of Linguistic Typology

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description

An important part of cross-linguistic variation manifests itself in the grammatical categories which are available in the grammar of a language, their semantic fine-grainedness and the obligatoriness of their use. The present paper will focus on three domains of grammar: (1) information structure and topicality, (2) converbs and clause combining and (3) modality and evidentiality. These domains are known to be prominent in Japanese and Korean grammar while they are clearly less relevant in English. The paper will first give a detailed account of these structures with examples from the US Test of Understanding in College Economics (TUCE). As will become quite clear, the versions of the test items in English, Japanese and Korean differ considerably with regard to the use of the grammatical categories from the above three domains and the fine-grainedness by which these categories mark the relations between different propositions and their overall truth status as well as the source of information on which they are based. Since these categories are directly related to comprehension and reasoning, we will ask how their presence or absence enhances or inhibits students’ ability of problem solving as reflected in their test performance. Even though the data from TUCE are not sufficient for getting significant results, there is some good evidence for correlations between the grammatical categories analysed here and performance in assessment tests.