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Part of
Three Streams of Generative Language Acquisition Research: Selected papers from the 7th Meeting of Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition – North America, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Edited by Tania Ionin and Matthew Rispoli
[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 63] 2019
► pp. 271–296

Acquisition of word order in L2 Spanish

The case of the auxiliary haber in conjunction with manner adverbs

| Rutgers University
Previous studies on Spanish adverb placement investigated how English natives reset their L1 [‑raise] to [+raise] but neglected the acquisition of adverb placement with haber (particularly, manner adverbs). The acquisition of haber/Participle/Adverb in Spanish depends on (1) the apparent lack of autonomy of haber forms, and (2) the neutral syntactic position of the adverb. To investigate the acquisition of “haber + manner adverb” by Spanish learners, 18 Spanish monolinguals and 33 L1 English Spanish learners completed a Grammaticality Judgment Task and an Explicit Production Task. Results suggest that (a) haber verbal forms lack autonomy; (b) había behaves as a syntactic clitic, and ha as a syntactic-phonological clitic; and (c) acquisition of “haber + manner adverb” order occurs successfully in learners.
Keywords: L2 Spanish, word order, manner adverbs, auxiliary verb
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous literature on the acquisition of word order in L2 Spanish: The case of manner adverbs and lexical verbs
  • 3.Auxiliary haber + manner adverbs word order
  • 4.Research questions and hypotheses
  • 5.Methodology
    • 5.1Participants
    • 5.2Experimental tasks
      • 5.2.1Task 1: Grammaticality Judgment Task (GJT)
      • 5.2.2Task 2: Explicit Production Task (EPT)
    • 5.3Procedure
    • 5.4Scoring
  • 6.Results
    • 6.1Task 1
      • 6.1.1Spanish monolingual group
      • 6.1.2Bilingual groups
    • 6.2Task 2
      • 6.2.1Spanish monolingual group
      • 6.2.2Bilingual groups
  • 7.Discussion
  • 8.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • 9. References
Published online: 15 April 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.63.14dar
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