The effect of construction frequency and native transfer on second language knowledge of the syntax–discourse interface

This article investigates knowledge of discourse-conditioned left dislocations in the interlanguage competence in Spanish and English second language learners. Although Spanish clitic left dislocation (CLLD) and English topicalization are functionally very similar, they differ in that the former but...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Applied psycholinguistics Vol. 36; no. 3; pp. 671 - 699
Main Author: SLABAKOVA, ROUMYANA
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: New York, USA Cambridge University Press 01.05.2015
Subjects:
Adult Basic Education
Adult Students
Advanced Students
Clitics
Competence
Discourse
Dislocation
English
English as a second language learning
English language
Grammar
Information processing
Interlanguage
Knowledge
Language
Language Proficiency
Languages
Learning transfer
Native language
Second Language Learning
Spanish
Spanish as a second language learning
Spanish language
Syntactic analysis
Syntactic structures
Syntax
Topic and comment
Transfer
New York
United States > US
ISSN:0142-7164, 1469-1817
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:This article investigates knowledge of discourse-conditioned left dislocations in the interlanguage competence in Spanish and English second language learners. Although Spanish clitic left dislocation (CLLD) and English topicalization are functionally very similar, they differ in that the former but not the latter requires the dislocated phrase to be clitic doubled. In contrast, the fronted focus (FF) construction is functionally and syntactically similar in the two languages. Two experimental studies investigated knowledge of the syntactic form and discourse appropriateness of CLLD and topicalization, using knowledge of FF as a baseline. English-native learners of Spanish were successful in acquiring CLLD as well as FF. However, Spanish-native learners of English demonstrated no knowledge of English topicalization even at near-native levels of proficiency, whereas they did well on the transferable FF. These results are examined in the light of the interface hypothesis. It is argued that construction frequency in the input and transfer from the native language, but only those two factors together, can explain the experimental results.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
content type line 14
content type line 23
ISSN:0142-7164
1469-1817
DOI:10.1017/S0142716413000386