Article published in:
The Acquisition of Spanish in Understudied Language Pairings
Edited by Tiffany Judy and Silvia Perpiñán
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 3] 2015
► pp. 201–232

Subject pronouns in the L2 Spanish of Moroccan Arabic speakers

Evidence from bilingual and second language learners

The goal of this study is to shed light on the conditions that regulate the interpretation of null and overt third person subject pronouns in ambiguous intra-sentential contexts in bilingual and L2 Spanish. An acceptability judgment task was administered to 26 Moroccan Arabic (MA)/Spanish bilinguals, 26 MA learners of L2 Spanish and 34 native controls. Three variables were manipulated: type of pronoun (null vs. overt), antecedent choice (subject vs. object) and clause order (main-subordinate vs. subordinate-main). The results reveal an effect of pronoun and clause order. Overall, both experimental groups show native-like pronominal preferences but L2 learners differ from native speakers specifically in subordinate-main order as they do not seem to benefit from microvariation between languages in the domain of pronoun interpretation. Keywords: subject pronouns; anaphora resolution; cross-linguistic influence; bilingual acquisition; L2 acquisition
Published online: 18 February 2015
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.3.08bel
Cited by

Cited by 3 other publications

Castro, Tammer, Jason Rothman & Marit Westergaard
2016. Comparing anaphora resolution in early and late Brazilian Portuguese-European Portuguese bidialectal bilinguals. Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada/Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics 29:2 ► pp. 429 ff. Crossref logo
García-Alcaraz, Estela & Aurora Bel
2019. Does empirical data from bilingual and native Spanish corpora meet linguistic theory? The role of discourse context in variation of subject expression . Applied Linguistics Review 10:4 ► pp. 491 ff. Crossref logo
Romano, Francesco Bryan
2019. Remarks on research of anaphora resolution in situations of language contact: Cross-linguistic influence and the PAS. International Journal of Bilingualism 23:1 ► pp. 3 ff. Crossref logo

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