Laura Domínguez

The role of dynamic contrasts in the L2 acquisition of Spanish past tense morphology

This study examines the second language acquisition of Spanish past tense morphology by three groups of English speakers (beginners, intermediates and advanced). We adopt a novel methodological approach – combining oral corpus data with controlled experimental data – in order to provide new evidence on the validity of the Lexical Aspect Hypothesis (LAH) in L2 Spanish. Data elicited through one comprehension and three oral tasks with varying degrees of experimental control show that the emergence of temporal markings is determined mainly by the dynamic/non-dynamic contrast (whether a verb is a state or an event) as beginner and intermediate speakers use Preterit with event verbs but Imperfect mainly with state verbs. One crucial finding is that although advanced learners use typical Preterit–telic associations in the least controlled oral tasks, as predicted by the LAH, this pattern is often reversed in tasks designed to include non-prototypical (and infrequent) form–meaning contexts. The results of the comprehension task also show that the Preterit-event and Imperfect-state associations observed in the production data determine the interpretation that learners assign to the Preterit and the Imperfect as well. These results show that beginner and intermediate learners treat event verbs (achievements, accomplishments and activities) in Spanish as a single class that they associate with Preterit morphology. We argue that dynamicity contrasts, and not telicity, affect learners’ use of past tense forms during early stages of acquisition.

Charting the route of bilingual development: Contributions from heritage speakers’ early acquisition

The study of early bilingual acquisition in heritage languages continues to be a valuable source of theoretical and empirical evidence for both general linguistic theory and acquisition theory. The articles featured in this special issue corroborate this by providing new data and analysis in a number of key morphosyntactic and prosodic areas of Romance languages, offering new insights to long-standing issues in bilingual acquisition. Specific areas include, interface vulnerability as a source of problems in bilingual children’s acquisition, incomplete acquisition as an explanation for heritage speaker’s non-target language, the effects of quality and frequency of input exposure in bilingual children and the effects of language contact on language acquisition. In this commentary, the main findings, contributions and merits of the articles are discussed in the context of language development and bilingual acquisition; links with existing relevant discussions and debates are highlighted; and possible paths for future research are suggested.

Untangling Locality and Orientation Constraints in the L2 Acquisition of Anaphoric Binding: A Feature-Based Approach

This study offers a Minimalist analysis of the L2 acquisition of binding properties whereby cross-linguistic differences arise from the interaction of anaphoric feature specifications and operations of the computational system (Reuland 2001, 2011; Hicks 2009). This analysis attributes difficulties in the L2 acquisition of locality and orientation properties in binding to problems reanalyzing the features responsible for reflexivization in the target language. Such an approach is shown to predict, in contrast to previous accounts, that if the locality and orientation behavior of English reflexives arise due to syntactic operations on their features (Agree), acquisition of locality cannot be achieved unless orientation is also acquired; a picture verification task completed by 70 Korean L2 speakers of English fully bears out this prediction. We show that for independent reasons, Korean speakers could still behave apparently nativelike for locality (by means of L1 transfer), but not for orientation. Crucially, this analysis can explain how two properties traditionally subsumed under the same Universal Grammar (UG) principle can appear to pose different learning difficulties to L2 speakers.

Review article Knowledge of features in fossilized second language grammars

This article examines two recent books on fossilization and assesses their contribution to our understanding of the causes of non-target performance in near-native grammars. The different accounts of fossilization these books present is outlined; one takes the view that a critical period prevents subjects from accessing syntactic features which are not available in their first language (L1), while the other takes the view that maturational problems make it difficult for learners to work out the mapping between syntactic features and their morphological expression. The contrasting consequences of each of these phenomena upon our understanding of fossilization, end-state grammars and the role played by the first language are highlighted. The possibility of moving away from a parameter-setting model of second language acquisition is discussed.

Spanish Imperfect revisited: Exploring L1 influence in the reassembly of imperfective features onto new L2 forms

This study investigates the acquisition of the Spanish Imperfect by 60 English learners of Spanish at three different proficiency levels (beginner, intermediate and advanced). Two oral production tasks and one interpretation task show that although the Imperfect is used from early on, the full array of interpretations associated with this form (habitual, continuous and progressive) is not completely acquired even at advanced levels. Learners accept the Imperfect in imperfective contexts but have problems rejecting the Preterit. This problem persists even at advanced levels in continuous contexts. The continuous is conveyed in English by Past Tense, which is used in both perfective and imperfective contexts, whereas in Spanish only the Imperfect is appropriate. We argue that the incorrect low rejection of the Preterit signals a mapping problem of aspect-related features present in both English and Spanish onto a new form (the Imperfect). These results support the problematic nature of feature reassembly in the acquisition of the Spanish Imperfect by English speakers.