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On the Acquisition of the Syntax of Romance
Edited by Anna Gavarró
[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 62] 2018
► pp. 215–234

Acquisition of backward anaphora in European Portuguese by Chinese learners

| Universidade de Lisboa

This study investigates pronominal resolution in backward anaphora in European Portuguese and its acquisition by second language learners whose first language is Chinese. An off-line experiment was conducted to investigate what strategies were adopted by the learners. The results show that the upper-intermediate (B2) learners may be influenced by their first language and the language universal active search mechanism of Kazanina et al. (2007), while the advanced (C1) learners only adopt the latter. The findings also show that learners from both levels fail to link the backward anaphoric pronoun to an extra-contextual entity.

Keywords: Second language acquisition, European Portuguese, Chinese, backward anaphora, pronominal resolution
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Review of previous studies
    • 2.1Previous studies on forward anaphora
    • 2.2The properties of backward anaphora
    • 2.3The processing of backward anaphora
  • 3.The objectives of the study
  • 4.The experimental study
    • 4.1Methods
      • 4.1.1Participants
      • 4.1.2Materials and procedure
    • 4.2The results of the experiment
    • 4.3Discussion
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 12 December 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.62.10zhe
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