Description
Recent research has suggested that phenomena acquired late in L1 may be challenging in bilingual development, mainly due to input factors (Tsimpli, 2014; Sorace,2014). Clitic placement in European Portuguese (EP), which depends on various factors (syntactic, lexical, semantic…), constitutes anappropriate testing ground for this hypothesis, since research on L1 acquisition (L1A) found that EP-speaking children begin by generalising enclisis to proclisis contexts and acquire knowledge of some of these contexts very late (Costa, Fiéis & Lobo, 2015). According to Costa et al. (2015), the acquisition of proclisis contexts follows a sequence (negation>negative subjects/subjunctive complement clauses>adverb já ‘already’> adverbial clauses>quantified subjects). The contexts acquired later are subject to variation in adult grammars. Preliminary studies suggest that the acquisition route of proclisis may be similar in L1 and L2 EP (Gu, 2019, 2022). However, the following questions remain open: Are the proclisis contexts that are acquired late in L1 EP challenging in L2A? Is the developmental route of proclisis contexts in L2 EP similar to the one observed in L1A? Is convergence with the L2 possible wrt clitic placement?
To address these questions, this study investigates clitic placement in L2 EP. Participants were 25 L1 EP speakers and 30 L1 Spanish-L2 EP adult learners (10 intermediates, 10 advanced, 10 near-natives). As clitic placement is taught explicitly, we used two tasks that tap primarily into implicit knowledge (Ellis, 2005): an elicited oral production task (EOPT) and a timed acceptability judgement task (TAJT), which tested enclisis and proclisis in sentences without a proclisis trigger, negative sentences, indicative and subjunctive complement clauses, adverbial clauses, and quantified subjects.
Results in the EOPT show that, like the natives, learners prefer enclisis in the absence of proclisis triggers.
In negation contexts and in subjunctive complement clauses, all groups display a preference for proclisis. In the other contexts, the native and near-native groups clearly prefer proclisis. Advanced learners prefer proclisis in indicative complement clauses and produce similar rates of enclisis and proclisis with adverbial clauses and quantified subjects. Intermediate learners exhibit optionality in indicative complement clauses and prefer enclisis in the remaining contexts. In the TAJT, all groups exhibit the same preferences regarding proclisis as in the EOPT, except the intermediate learners, who display optionality with adverbial clauses and quantified subjects.
These results show that enclisis stabilizes earlier than proclisis, which develops sequentially, following a route similar to that observed in L1A: the first contexts to be acquired are negative and subjunctive clauses. The contexts where the overgeneralization of enclisis is more persistent are sentences with adverbial clauses and quantified subjects. These proclisis contexts are described as less categorical in native grammars, which is confirmed by the control group’s results. This may give rise to greater input variability, adding complexity to the acquisition task. As a result, prolonged input exposure is required to discover the patterns of clitic placement in both L1 and L2 EP. This study thus confirms the hypothesis that
input alone can account for the late acquisition of some grammatical properties in L1 and L2A.
Period | 31 Aug 2023 |
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Event title | The 32nd Conference of the European Second Language Association |
Event type | Conference |
Location | Birmingham, United KingdomShow on map |
Degree of Recognition | International |