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Part of
Current Theoretical and Applied Perspectives on Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics
Edited by Diego Pascual y Cabo and Idoia Elola
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 27] 2020
► pp. 233–252

Chapter 11
The acquisition of personal a among Chinese-speaking L2 learners of Spanish

A case for syntactic complexity

| Purdue University
| Purdue University
| Rutgers University

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.

Keywords: second language acquisition, Spanish dom, Mandarin, structural complexity, clitic left-dislocation
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
Published online: 4 June 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.27.11jia
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