Case and φ-feature agreement in advanced L2 Spanish grammars

One account of divergence in advanced L2 grammars is that speakers fail to acquire functional features in the L2 that are not part of the L1 inventory, and that this leads to non-native representations. Since this idea was first proposed by Hawkins and Chan (1997), few studies have provided the type of data which would allow for it to be adequately tested. This paper presents experimental data from two studies of the acquisition of Case, number and gender agreement in a group of advanced learners of Spanish who are L1 speakers of English, French, German, Greek, Italian and Portuguese. Differences were found between accuracy on Case and number agreement on the one hand, and gender agreement on the other, in ways predicted by the Failed Functional Features hypothesis.