Acceptability (and Other) Experiments for Studying Comparative Syntax

Chacón, Dustin Alfonso

doi:10.1017/9781108569620.008

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

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“…The results for the L1 Spanish group are also interesting for another reason: in contrast to what we see here with the L1 Spanish speakers, experimental studies of Spanish have consistently shown no asymmetry between subject and object extraction in structures like these (i.e. no main effect of extraction site), as shown in Chacón (2015Chacón ( , 2021 and Rodríguez and Goodall (2020). This strongly suggests that the degradation with subject extraction seen in our results for this group is truly an L2 effect, not an L1 transfer effect.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 50%

The source of the that-trace effect: New evidence from L2 English

Kim

Goodall

2022

Second Language Research

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Recent approaches to the that-trace phenomenon in English include syntactic analyses based on the principle of Anti-locality and a sentence production analysis based on the Principle of End Weight. These analyses have many similarities, but they differ in their predictions for second language (L2) speakers. In an Anti-locality analysis, we expect L2 speakers to show a pattern very similar to first language (L1) speakers, with substantial degradation in acceptability for extraction of a subject from an embedded clause with that. In the Principle of End Weight analysis, we expect L2 speakers to display this same subject extraction degradation whether or not the embedded clause has that. A sentence acceptability experiment with L1 English speakers and two groups of L2 English speakers (L1 Korean and L1 Spanish) confirm the prediction of the Principle of End Weight analysis: the L1 speakers show degradation with subject extraction from a that-clause, while the L2 speakers do the same with clauses with and without that. These results form an interesting contrast with studies of island effects, which have generally found substantial L1~L2 similarities, and show how L2 data can be used as evidence to decide between competing analyses of L1 phenomena.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 50%