ERIC Number: EJ752040
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2006
Pages: 34
Abstractor: Author
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0267-6583
EISSN: N/A
On the Second Language Acquisition of Spanish Reflexive Passives and Reflexive Impersonals by French- and English-Speaking Adults
Tremblay, Annie
Second Language Research, v22 n1 p30-63 2006
This study, a partial replication of Bruhn de Garavito (1999a; 1999b), investigates the second language (L2) acquisition of Spanish reflexive passives and reflexive impersonals by French- and English-speaking adults at an advanced level of proficiency. The L2 acquisition of Spanish reflexive passives and reflexive impersonals by native French and English speakers instantiates a potential learnability problem, because (1) the constructions are superficially very similar ("se" V DP) but display distinct idiosyncratic morphological and syntactic behaviour; (2) neither exists in English, and the reflexive impersonal does not exist in French; and (3) differences between the two are typically not subject to explicit instruction. Participants--13 English, 16 French and 27 Spanish speakers (controls)--completed a 64-item grammaticality-judgement task. Results show that L2 learners could in general differentiate grammatical from ungrammatical items, but they performed significantly differently from the control group on most sentence types. A look at the participants' accuracy rates indicates that few L2 learners performed accurately on most sentence types. Grammatical and ungrammatical test items involving [+animate] DPs preceded or not by the object-marking preposition a were particularly problematic, as L2 learners judged them both as grammatical. These results confirm that the L2 acquisition of Spanish reflexive passives and reflexive impersonals by French- and English-speaking adults instantiates a learnability problem, not yet overcome at an advanced level of proficiency.
Descriptors: Form Classes (Languages), Second Language Learning, Adults, Test Items, Grammar, Sentences, French, Control Groups, Spanish, English, Native Speakers, Task Analysis, Verbs, Language Proficiency
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
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Language: English
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