UM Linguistics Club presents Michael Olsen

Syntax or Semantics? The L2 learner conundrum in the acquisition of Spanish object pronouns

April 24th
4PM
Phyllis J. Washington College of Education and Human Sciences
Room 312

When acquiring Spanish object pronouns (OP), English-speaking second language (L2) learners must learn the variety of forms available, word order differences between English and Spanish, and Case distinctions, which English has all but lost completely from object pronouns. The acquisition of Case in particular is an aspect that has not been thoroughly investigated. Zyzik (2006) showed, through online production tasks, that English-speaking L2 learners of Spanish overgeneralize the dative form to accusative contexts when the referent is animate. This study further investigates how L2 learners are using Animacy instead of Case markings as cues to interpret and produce L2 Spanish object pronouns.

Data from a sentence-completion task (an interpretation task) and a cloze task (a production task) were collected from 121 intermediate to advanced levels of Spanish learners. Results from mixed ANOVAs suggest that learners show clear effects of the influence of Animacy on object pronoun distinction in the production task; using the dative form with human referents and the accusative forms with animate and inanimate referents. These effects are less evident in the interpretation task. Results suggest that lower proficiency learners may not be processing OP distinctions in interpretive tasks while higher proficiency learners are beginning to do so. These results indicate differences between task types and provide more evidence that Animacy is a salient cue that learners use when acquiring a second language.