On the (Un)-Ambiguity of Adjectival Modification in Spanish Determiner Phrases

Abstract

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).

Second language acquisition at the interfaces

“…It is certainly true that some differences reported with respect to the same phenomenon are likely attributable to methodological differences. For example, as we have seen, with respect to the subtle interpretive contrasts related to position of adjectives in Romance languages, Coppieters (1987) reports that near-native speakers fail to acquire these contrasts, in contrast to Anderson (2008) and Rothman et al (2010). As mentioned above, only the latter studies included contexts in their tasks, which clearly assisted L2ers to reach the relevant interpretations.…”

“…This issue has recently received attention again, couched explicitly in interface terms. Results from Anderson (2008) for L2 French and Rothman et al (2010) for L2 Spanish suggest that L2 learners do in fact acquire the appropriate subtle contrasts in meaning, although often not until they have reached higher levels of proficiency.…”

“…Coppieters employed a highly metalinguistic means of assessing linguistic competence, asking L2ers to articulate the meanings of certain utterances, with no contexts supplied. 2 In contrast, one of the tasks employed by Rothman et al (2010) was a semantic interpretation task, where learners had to select an interpretation without having to describe or explain it. In a production task, Rothman et al provided contexts to try to elicit appropriate word orders and Anderson (2008) provided contexts in a grammaticality judgment task.…”

Missing verbal inflections as a representational problem

“…Given the debate on whether gender is an acquirable feature or not for those whose L1 does not have gender (e.g. Carroll, 2001;Franceschina, 2005;Keating, 2009;Rothman, Judy, Guijarro-Fuentes, & Pires, 2010;Sabourin, Stowe, & de Haan, 2006), it is not clear to what extent her research can speak to research related to morphological inflections on verbs. Bruhn de Garavito (2003) also looked at what she called "recognition" as opposed to production.…”

The Two Faces of SLA: Mental Representation and Skill

“…The reason for this is that some kind of finite verb must carry tense features (the strong Tense issue) and lexical verbs (as opposed to auxiliaries and modals) in English cannot move to create subject-verb inversion in questions as is the case with languages like Spanish (the weak Agreement issue). In short, learners must create (and do create) abstract underlying syntactic representations that have little to do with textbook rules (e.g., Herschensohn, 2000;Rothman, Judy, Guijarro-Fuentes, & Pires, 2010). This simplified description of do-support is one example that begs the question: then what "skill" is it that learners are getting when they are practicing pedagogical grammar rules?…”