Learners' Competence May Be More Accurate than We Think: Spanish L2 and Agreement Morphology (original) (raw)
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Agreement morphology errors and null subjects in young (non-)CLIL learners
2021
There is a wealth of studies on L2 English acquisition in CLIL contexts in Spain, but most have underexplored the potential impact of CLIL in the longer run on the morphosyntax of earlier starters from monolingual regions. This paper fills this gap by exploring agreement morphology errors and subject omission in the oral production of Primary Education English learners from the Spanish monolingual community of Cantabria. The sample investigated consists of the individual narration of a story by learners in two age-matched (11-12 year-olds) groups, one CLIL (n=28) and one nonCLIL (n=35). The results show no statistically significant differences between both groups for the provision of specific linguistic features at a younger age, though some evidence also points to a subtle effect of additional CLIL exposure. Both groups show moderately low rates of null subjects; they omit affixal morphology (*he eat ) significantly more frequently than suppletive inflection (*he _ eating) and they...
Verb acquisition in monolingual and multilingual children and adults
Proceedings of GALA 2017: Language Acquisition and Development, 2019
We investigated whether children and adults, French monolinguals (L1) or multilinguals (MUL) are sensitive to regular, sub-regular and irregular verb inflection patterns. We hypothesized that MUL participants would process these patterns differently, from L1-speakers, based on their default status or reliability, due to less exposure to French. Children were also expected to show lower proficiency than adults. Verbs were elicited in 162 children (preschoolers and first graders attending French school) and 36 adults that were either French L1 or MUL, all from the Montréal Canada area. Twenty-four French verbs were used to elicit the passé composé (perfect past) with regular, sub-regular, and irregular participle forms (6 each: ending in /e/, /i/, /y/ or Other idiosyncratic forms) using our Android application. Logistic regression analyses showed effects for verb group and participant group: adults responded better than children. Verb group comparisons revealed that Other verbs are significantly harder to produce than those ending in /e/ and in /i/, but not significantly harder than verbs ending in /y/. Children show additive effects of parental education and age. These data indicate that all participants show strengths on default patterns and sensitivity to sub-regular verbs, even though MUL children and adults have less exposure to French.
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 2020
We provide a snapshot of childhood morphology development in our investigation of two profiles of bilinguals (age 9-10) in an English-Spanish dual immersion academic setting: Spanish heritage language (SHL, n = 21) and second language (SL2, n = 41) children. Three tasks were given to the 62 bilinguals and 15 age-matched controls (Spanish first language, SL1): oral comprehension of 20 singular-plural present verbs, written sentence production of 10 similar verbs, and a meaning-focused writing task. SHL children were comparable to controls in production of number agreement, and showed no asymmetry between comprehension and production. SL2 learners showed lower accuracy than both SHL and SL1 children. A similar pattern was observed when person agreement and tense, aspect, mood and vowel errors were considered. The most common error among SHL and SL2 children was overregularization of stem vowels, a typical developmental error. The Feature Reassembly model of grammar can accommodate the range of possibilities represented by the data we present.
Revealing Early Comprehension of Subject-Verb Agreement in Spanish
2013
Previous research has revealed that, in at least some languages, children’s comprehension of subject-verb (SV) agreement is delayed compared to production. For example, children acquiring Spanish and English have not been found to show comprehension of number agreement in the 3 person until surprisingly late, around age 5 (Spanish: PérezLeroux, 2005; English: Johnson, de Villiers, & Seymour, 2005). However, children acquiring these languages are claimed to reliably produce SV agreement by age 21⁄2 (Mueller Gathercole eb sti n o to, 1999; Montrul, 2004). Thus, the acquisition of SV agreement early in development appears to represent a striking reversal of the typical comprehensionproduction asymmetry (Fraser, Bellugi, & Brown, 1963). In a recent series of studies, we have shown that comprehension of number SV agreement is not in fact universally late, but may depend on language-particular factors. Using identical methodology and visual stimuli, we found evidence of successful compreh...
Agarra, agarran: Evidence of early comprehension of subject–verb agreement in Spanish
Studies across many languages (e.g., Dutch, English, Farsi, Spanish, Xhosa) have failed to show early acquisition of subject–verb (SV) agreement, whereas recent studies on French reveal acquisition by 30 months of age. Using a similar procedure as in previous French studies, the current study evaluated whether earlier comprehension of SV agreement in (Mexican) Spanish can be revealed when task demands are lowered. Two experiments using a touch-screen pointing task tested comprehension of SV agreement by monolingual Spanish-speaking children growing up in Mexico City between about 3 and 5 years of age. In Experiment 1, the auditory stimuli consisted of a transitive verb + pseudonoun object (e.g., agarra el micho 'he throws the micho' vs. agarran el duco 'they throw the duco'); results failed to show early comprehension of SV agreement, replicating previous findings. In Experiment 2, the same stimuli were used, with the crucial difference that the word objeto 'object' replaced all pseudonouns; results revealed SV agreement comprehension as early as 41 to 50 months. Taken together, our findings show that comprehension at this age is facilitated when task demands are lowered, here by not requiring children to process pseudowords (even when these were not critical to the task). Hence, these findings underscore the importance of task-specific/stimulus-specific features when testing early
Usage-based approaches to language, language learning, and multilingualism, 2016
Previous second language acquisition studies have shown that English-speaking learners of Spanish, especially at the beginning and intermediate levels of proficiency, persistently misinterpret O-cliticVS sentences. Due to transfer effects, these learners rely on word order as the most valid cue for agenthood, and, therefore, incorrectly assign the preverbal object clitic the role of agent. In this study we explore whether advanced learners are also prone to such misinterpretation errors, and whether they are able to make use of number agreement morphology to reconfigure their L1 processing strategies. In a self-paced reading study, we manipulated match/mismatch in number agreement between the clitic and the verb: in 50 percent of the target sentences, agreement was not a useful cue for overcoming the word order bias (e.g., Locl-sg estávb-sg mirando la chica, “The girl is looking at him”), whereas in the other 50 percent the clitic and verb mismatched (e.g., Locl-sg estánvb-pl mirando las chicas, “The girls are looking at him”), so that agreement provided a useful cue for arriving at the correct interpretation of the 2 clitic as the patient. Comprehension questions were used to probe participants’ interpretations of the sentences they had read. Results show that even advanced Spanish learners strongly relied on word order when interpreting OclVS sentences. However, learner accuracy improved in the mismatching conditions when the morphological cue indexing agreement mismatch was found on the verb. In addition, participants tended to present longer reading times in the verb region of ClsgVplSpl structures.
EuroAmerican Journal of Applied Linguistics and Languages, 2015
EN This article reports on a study, with online measures, which investigated the processing of subject-verb (SV) agreement sentences by one group of heritage Spanish speakers (HSs), two groups of L2 learners of Spanish (L1 English) and one group of traditional Spanish native speakers. Experimental SV sentences manipulated person and number features with subjects and verbs in the present tense. Between-group statistical analyses indicated differential processing between the heritage and the L2 groups. The heritage group's performance was more native-like than the L2 participants. Within-subject tests showed some similar patterns between heritage and L2 high-level processing, including delayed sensitivity to ungrammaticality after the verb region. We argue that the HSs were able to process basic grammar structures, just as traditional native speakers do. This suggests early bilingualism conferred an advantage to HSS when compared to L2 learners, in the control of basic agreement in Spanish.