Chapter 11
The acquisition of personal a among Chinese-speaking L2 learners of Spanish
A case for syntactic complexity
The present study examines the acquisition of differential object marking (dom) in Spanish among Mandarin-speaking L2 learners from China. Unlike Mandarin, which marks the direct object only in preverbal position (i.e., in SOV sentences) and is a topic-prominent language, Spanish allows dom in both simple and clitic left-dislocated (CLLD) sentences. We predicted L2 learners to have more difficulty with CLLD structures than with simple sentences due to structural complexity issues. Results from an Elicited Production task showed target-like performance in simple sentences among the L2 learners but overextension of the a-marker to contexts where it is not required in CLLD structures. The results are discussed along the lines of previous work on the effects of crosslinguistic influence and structural complexity.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Differential Object Marking in Spanish and Mandarin
- 2.1Semantic properties of Spanish dom
- 2.2Spanish dom in CLLD structures
- 2.3Object case marking in Mandarin
- 3.Previous studies on the acquisition of Spanish Differential Object Marking
- 4.Research questions and hypotheses
- 5.The study
- 5.1Participants
- 5.2Tasks and procedures
- 6.Results
- 6.1Simple sentences
- 6.2Clitic left-dislocated sentences
- 6.3Individual analysis
- 7.Discussion and conclusions
-
Acknowledgement
-
Notes
-
References
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Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
Martínez Vera, Gabriel, Julio César López Otero, Marina Y. Sokolova, Adam Cleveland, Megan Tzeitel Marshall & Liliana Sánchez
2023.
Aspectual se and Telicity in Heritage Spanish Bilinguals: The Effects of Lexical Access, Dominance, Age of Acquisition, and Patterns of Language Use.
Languages 8:3
► pp. 201 ff.
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