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L2 Grammar and L2 Processing in the Acquisition of Spanish Prepositional Relative Clauses*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 October 2014

SILVIA PERPIÑÁN
SILVIA PERPIÑÁN*
Affiliation:
The University of Western Ontario
*
Address for correspondence: Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University College, Room 152, London, ONCANADAN6A 3K7sperpina@uwo.ca
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Abstract

This paper investigates the acquisition of prepositional relative clauses in L2 Spanish by English and Arabic speakers to understand the role of previous linguistic knowledge and Universal Grammar on the one hand, and the relationship between grammatical knowledge and its use in real-time, on the other. An oral production task and an on-line self-paced grammaticality judgment task were analyzed. Results indicated that the acquisition of oblique relative clauses is a problematic area for L2 learners. Divergent results compared to native speakers in production and grammatical intuitions were found; however, L2 reading time data showed the same real-time effects that native speakers had, suggesting that the problems with this construction are not necessarily linked to processing deficits. These results are interpreted as evidence for the ability to apply universal processing principles in a second language, and the relative independence of the processing domain and the production system.

Keywords

L2 language processingprepositional relative clausesNull-PrepShallow Structure HypothesisFundamentally Identical Hypothesis
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 18 , Issue 4 , October 2015 , pp. 577 - 596
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers who provided critical feedback on various aspects of the manuscript, as well as the editor; their time and insights are greatly appreciated. I would also like to thank the informants that participated in this study, and in particular the institutions that provided help with the data collection in Tetouan, Morocco. I am indebted to the language academy Dar Loughat, and the Instituto Cervantes in Tetouan. Thanks also to Ileana Paul who commented on an earlier version of this paper. Of course, any errors or misconceptions remain mine.

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