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Portuguese-Spanish Interfaces: Diachrony, synchrony, and contact
Edited by Patrícia Amaral and Ana Maria Carvalho
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 1] 2014
► pp. 317–334

On the structural basis of non-redundant acquisition

Evidence from Spanish bilingual L3 Portuguese

| University of Reading
ORCID logo | Rutgers University
| Indiana University

This chapter has two goals: (a) to discuss the Spanish-Portuguese interface in current formal language acquisition research and (b) to highlight the contributions of this language pairing in the emerging field of formal third language (L3) acquisition. The authors discuss two L3 acquisition studies (Montrul, Dias, & Santos, 2011; Giancaspro, Halloran, & Iverson, in press) examining Differential Object Marking, a morphological case marker present in Spanish but not in Portuguese, arguing that the results show how data from Spanish-English bilinguals learning Brazilian Portuguese as an L3 illuminate the deterministic role of structural and typological similarity in linguistic transfer. The data provide supportive evidence for only one of three existing L3 transfer models: the Typological Proximity Model (Rothman, 2010, 2011, 2013).

Published online: 30 October 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.1.16rot
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