Pedro Guijarro-Fuentes

The acquisition of interpretable features in L2 Spanish: Personal a

This paper examines the acquisition of interpretable features in English second language (L2) learners of Spanish by investigating the personal preposition a in Spanish. The distribution of a in direct object NPs relates to the animacy/specificity of the NP, the animacy/agentivity of the subject, and the semantics of the predicate (Torrego, 1998; Zagona, 2002); i.e., personal a is conditioned by the interpretability of semantic features. Forty-nine English L2 learners of Spanish of three different proficiency levels, and 16 Spanish controls took part in a Completion Task and an Acceptability Judgement Task. These revealed that L2 learners of Spanish of all proficiency levels behaved differently from native speakers of Spanish. The L2 learners appear to have acquired some of the interpretable features (i.e., [±animate]), but show delays with others. Nonetheless, our data show partial convergence by advanced learners with the native speakers: some features are acquirable, while others may be less accessible and subject to developmental processes. In explaining our data we appeal to Lardieres (2008, 2009) Feature Reassembly Hypothesis, but assess it critically and aim to develop it further by considering the complexity constraints in terms of the number of features involved and their configuration.

Variation in contemporary Spanish: Linguistic predictors of estar in four cases of language contact

In some contact situations between Spanish and English there is an acceleration of the process of the extension of estar that may be due to lack of access to the formal written standard, features of English in particular or general processes of simplification that result from the cognitive demands of bilingualism (Silva-Corvalan, 1994). In our large-scale analysis of data from a contextualized preference task collected in four areas of the lberian Peninsula where Spanish is in contact with a regional language (Basque, Catalan, Galician and Valencian) and in monolingual regions of Spain, we identify differences in the numbers of unanimous responses, and frequency and predictors of estar selection across populations. We show that more frequent selection of estar is not a characteristic of all bilingual groups, and several linguistic predictors of estar are common to all groups. Additionally, we find that more frequent selection of estar occurs in some varieties even among bilinguals with ample access to the formal standard.

Clitics in L1 bilingual acquisition

Data from two bilingual Basque–Spanish children are analysed with respect to the grammatical domain of clitic drop, involving the interface between pragmatics and syntax. Basque Spanish allows for clitic drop in referential contexts, an option that does not exist in standard Spanish. The data suggest that the early high rate of clitic drop is most probably due to two factors: first, cross-linguistic influence from Basque because Basque lacks clitics – and hence the complement position is either occupied by a DP or pro – and both children studied in the present article drop more clitics in Spanish than the monolinguals reported in the literature (Fujino & Sano, 2002); and second, because children seem to have a notion of topic that equals information recoverability.

ON THE (UN)-AMBIGUITY OF ADJECTIVAL MODIFICATION IN SPANISH DETERMINER PHRASES: Informing Debates on the Mental Representations of L2 Syntax

This study contributes to a central debate within contemporary generative second language (L2) theorizing: the extent to which adult learners are (un)able to acquire new functional features that result in a L2 grammar that is mentally structured like the native target (see White, 2003 ). The adult acquisition of L2 nominal phi-features is explored, with focus on the syntactic and semantic reflexes in the related domain of adjective placement in two experimental groups: English-speaking intermediate ( n = 21) and advanced ( n = 24) learners of Spanish, as compared to a native-speaker control group ( n = 15). Results show that, on some of the tasks, the intermediate L2 learners appear to have acquired the syntactic properties of the Spanish determiner phrase but, on other tasks, to show some delay with the semantic reflexes of prenominal and postnominal adjectives. Crucially, however, our data demonstrate full convergence by all advanced learners and thus provide evidence in contra the predictions of representational deficit accounts (e.g., Hawkins & Chan, 1997; Hawkins & Franceschina, 2004; Hawkins & Hattori, 2006).

The Syntax-Semantics of Bare and Definite Plural Subjects in the L2 Spanish of English Natives

This study investigates the extent to which advanced native-English L2 learners of Spanish come to acquire restrictions on bare plural preverbal subjects in L2 Spanish (e.g. gatos “cats” vs. definite plurals such as los gatos “the cats”). It tests L2 knowledge of available semantic readings of bare plurals and definite plurals in Spanish, where [+specific] and [+generic] interpretations are syntactically represented differently from English. Assuming L1 transfer, and in view of a potential subset/superset relationship of the two grammars, the learning task in this domain is not a straightforward one. Target acquisition requires both grammatical expansion and retraction; Spanish definite plural subjects require the addition of an L1-unavailable [+generic] reading, while a loss of an L1-available [+generic] reading for preverbal subject bare plurals is required. The results and analysis show that advanced L2 learners of Spanish (English L1) can circumvent a superficial subset/superset learnability problem by means of feature resetting in line with the Nominal Mapping Parameter.

Evidence of V to I raising in L2 Spanish

This article focuses on the acquisition of verb placement (adverb placement, subject–verb inversion in yes/no questions, subject–verb inversion in direct, indirect and pseudo wh-questions) in L2 Spanish. Four different elicitation tasks (an identification task, a grammaticality judgment task, a preference grammaticality task and a production task) were used for data collection. The subjects were 41 English adult L2 learners of Spanish at different proficiency levels (beginners, low intermediate, intermediate and advanced) according to an independent placement test. In line with Lardiere’s (1998a, 1998b, 2000) and Prévost and White’s (2000) findings, evidence for developments in syntax which is independent of developments in morphology is found in support of the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis. Although L2 learners’ verb-placement is target like at the surface level, their knowledge of verb agreement is poor and limited. That is, L2 learners appear to have reset the verb movement parameter in Spanish (i.e., [+movement]), even though they fail to morphologically mark the verb for person and number correctly, showing lack of knowledge that the inflections in Spanish I are strong. These findings suggest that there is a strong dissociation between syntax and morphology (Lardiere, 2000), but they will also be discussed in the light of some current theories on the acquisition of new values for uninterpretable syntactical features (Hawkins & Hattori, 2006; Tsimpli & Dimitrakopoulou, 2007).

The impact of instruction on second-language implicit knowledge: Evidence against encapsulation

This paper compares explicit instruction in second-language Spanish with a control treatment on a written picture description task and a timed auditory grammaticality judgment task. Participants came from two intact, third-year US high school classes, with one experiencing a week of communicative lessons on the Spanish clitic se (n = 15) and the other exposed to se only incidentally (n = 20). Explicit instruction consisted of grammar rules with sentence-level examples, followed by communicative tasks. Three test versions were administered within a split-bloc design as a pretest, immediate posttest, and delayed posttest 6 weeks after instruction. The instructed group increased targetlike uses of se on both tasks and sustained gains through the delayed posttest, although first-language transfer errors persisted. Meanwhile, overgeneralization errors centered on semantic and syntactic contexts similar to the instructional object, aligning with the unergative–unaccusative distinction among intransitive verbs. It is argued that the data provide evidence for the permeability of second-language implicit knowledge to explicit instruction and against total encapsulation as a model of the mind.

The Linguistic Competence of Early Basque-Spanish Bilingual Children and a Spanish Monolingual Child

In this article, we sought to investigate the acquisition of gender features by two Basque–Spanish bilingual children when compared to a Spanish monolingual child. Basque is a language that lacks gender features and nominal agreement, whereas Spanish classifies nouns into two classes, that is, masculine and feminine, and has determiner phrase internal agreement. The internal architecture of Basque and Spanish differ on two crucial ways: the presence or absence of agreement and the presence or absence of the syntactic projection ClassP. Hence, the acquisition of gender sheds some light on the internal architecture of the determiner phrase. The studies on gender acquisition by Spanish monolinguals or bilinguals of any combination are not numerous. For this reason, we provide a detailed description of gender development and a thorough analysis of gender errors by a monolingual Spanish child and two Basque–Spanish bilinguals. This study shows that the masculine is not the default gender, neither for the monolingual child analysed nor for bilinguals because both groups overgeneralize masculine as well as feminine. Moreover, none of the children exclusively use the masculine with all nouns at a first stage to converge to target grammar in a subsequent stage. Basque–Spanish bilinguals use masculine determiners with feminine nouns in the majority of contexts from the outset of language acquisition, whereas the monolingual child performs the opposite way. Interestingly, bilinguals require more time to acquire the intricacies of Spanish gender. In other words, they make gender errors even at advanced stages of development, when the monolingual Spanish child studied in this article presents a target-like gender performance. The analysed data show that Basque influences Spanish, resulting in language delay because of the internal architecture of the determiner phrase and to a minor extent by the surface overlap between Spanish and Basque. However, our interpretation is cautious because of the scarcity of such examples and the limited corpus available.

On the first and second language acquisition of spatial language

Abstract This paper provides a brief overview of some of the main issues concerning the acquisition of spatial language as a first or second language. We first consider spatial language variation and the challenges cross-linguistic language differences present for language learners. We then discuss similarities and differences in first and second language acquisition, concluding with a brief précis of the contributions in this special issue.

Introduction to language acquisition, bilingualism and copula choice in Spanish

In several of the most widely read Spanish grammars an entire chapter is devoted to the two copular verbs in Spanish, ser “to be” and estar “to be”, and their many contexts of use (Bull, 1965; Sole and Sole, 1977; Whitley, 1986; Bosque and Demonte, 1999; King and Suner, 1999; Butt and Benjamin, 2000). For some, the interest in this structure stems from the range of meanings that can be expressed with these two forms, whereas for others it is the variability in the use of these verbs with adjectives, existing between groups, individuals and particular social contexts, that generates inquiry. The combination of these two traits makes the contrast difficult to acquire and likely to be lost or weakened in contexts of language attrition or language contact (Silva-Corvalan, 1986; Geeslin, 2002) and this complexity makes the copula contrast in Spanish an excellent mechanism for exploring broader issues such as theories of acquisition and language change, which are of value to a readership well beyond those working directly on Spanish. After a brief description of the distribution of ser and estar, we provide an overview of the various theoretical descriptions of the copula contrast that exist and their implications for research on bilingualism. Next, we provide a description of the papers in this volume, and outline the areas of interest for readers whose research extends beyond Spanish grammar.