Recent second language (L2) acquisition research has proposed that purely syntactic features are easier to acquire and less vulnerable than ones involving the interfaces (Sorace, 2004; Serratrice et al. 2004). The present paper addresses this issue by investigating the acquisition of the Spanish personal preposition a in English L2 learners of Spanish. The distribution of a in direct object NPs relates to the specificity/definiteness of the NP, the animacy/agentivity of the subject, and verb semantics (Torrego 1998; Zagona 2002). 33 English L2 learners of Spanish of different proficiency levels, and 14 Spanish controls participated in an acceptability judgement task. The results showed significant differences between native speakers and L2 learners of all proficiency levels, who performed at chance, and support the claim that L2 learners have difficulties acquiring structures involving the syntax/semantics interface. However, the advanced learners showed sensitivity to the least complex condition providing evidence that interface phenomena may be acquirable.
2022. Linguistic Variation in the Acquisition of Morphosyntax: Variable Object Marking in the Speech of Mexican Children and Their Caregivers. Language Learning and Development 18:3 ► pp. 310 ff.
Chamorro, Gloria, Patrick Sturt & Antonella Sorace
2016. Selectivity in L1 Attrition: Differential Object Marking in Spanish Near-Native Speakers of English. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 45:3 ► pp. 697 ff.
Cuza, Alejandro, Jian Jiao & Julio César López-Otero
2018. Does Typological Proximity Really Matter? Evidence from Mandarin and Brazilian Portuguese-Speaking Learners of Spanish. Languages 3:2 ► pp. 13 ff.
2019. Structure complexity effects in child heritage Spanish: The case of the Spanish personala. International Journal of Bilingualism 23:6 ► pp. 1333 ff.
GIANCASPRO, DAVID, BECKY HALLORAN & MICHAEL IVERSON
2015. Transfer at the initial stages of L3 Brazilian Portuguese: A look at three groups of English/Spanish bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 18:2 ► pp. 191 ff.
Hopp, Holger & Mayra E. León Arriaga
2016. Structural and inherent case in the non-native processing of Spanish: Constraints on inflectional variability. Second Language Research 32:1 ► pp. 75 ff.
2015. Learner corpora as a research tool for the investigation of lexical competence in L2 Spanish. Journal of Spanish Language Teaching 2:2 ► pp. 180 ff.
2022. Productive Vocabulary Knowledge Predicts Acquisition of Spanish DOM in Brazilian Portuguese-Speaking Learners. Languages 7:4 ► pp. 273 ff.
Martoccio, Alyssa
2018. How does prior explicit knowledge affect the efficacy of explicit instruction and feedback? The case of the personal a in L2 Spanish. Language Teaching Research 22:4 ► pp. 379 ff.
Martoccio, Alyssa
2022. Gender assignment strategies used by L1 and L2 speakers of Spanish
. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching 60:2 ► pp. 229 ff.
Montrul, Silvina
2011. Multiple interfaces and incomplete acquisition. Lingua 121:4 ► pp. 591 ff.
Mueller Gathercole, Virginia C., Rocío S. Pérez-Tattam, Hans Stadthagen-González, Nadine I. Laporte & Enlli M. Thomas
2019. WHODUNNIT? Language interaction in identification of sentential subjects in Wales and Patagonia. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 22:7 ► pp. 897 ff.
Nediger, Will, Acrisio Pires & Pedro Guijarro-Fuentes
2019. Integrating Linguistic Theory and Experimentation in L2 Acquisition: Learning of Spanish Differential Object Marking by Portuguese and English speakers
. Applied Linguistics Review 10:2 ► pp. 219 ff.
Nerea, Madariaga
2018. The category of animacy and its acquisition in the grammars of Russian and Spanish. Cuadernos Iberoamericanos :2 ► pp. 48 ff.
Regulez, Begoña Arechabaleta & Silvina Montrul
2023. Production, acceptability, and online comprehension of Spanish differential object marking by heritage speakers and L2 learners. Frontiers in Psychology 14
Rothman, Jason & Becky Halloran
2013. Formal Linguistic Approaches to L3/Ln Acquisition: A Focus on Morphosyntactic Transfer in Adult Multilingualism. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 33 ► pp. 51 ff.
Slabakova, Roumyana
2013. Meaning in Second Language Spanish. In The Handbook of Spanish Second Language Acquisition, ► pp. 311 ff.
2023. The effects of distributed versus massed corrective feedback on the acquisition of Spanish differential object marking. The Modern Language Journal 107:3 ► pp. 756 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 29 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
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