Acquiring a Foreign Language: the Recognition of the English Resultative Construction by Spanish Native Speakers

CELI, MARIA ALEJANDRA

Congreso; 9th International Conference on Meaning and Knowledge Representation (MKR); 2022

Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

A great deal of attention has been paid to the acquisition of English as a Foreign Language in general, and by Spanish native speakers in particular. However, very little work has been done on how Spanish native speakers acquire the English Resultative Construction (ERC), a structure that carries a number of syntactic-semantic interface features that conform to a particular way of event representation, namely, that of satellite-framed language like English (Talmy, 2000). Interestingly, Spanish is a verb-framed language, a language with an opposite way of construing events than the one codified by the ERC. We wonder to what extent Spanish native speakers of English recognize the different types of ERC (ERC-Path as in Bill rolled the ball down the hill; ERC-Property as in He wiped the table clean; and ERC-Fake Reflexive like The baby cried himself asleep) as part of the syntax-semantics framework of the foreign language. In order to do so, we conducted an Acceptability Judgment Task (AJT) with response time measure to analyze how participants of different proficiency levels manage to recognize the different syntax-semantic selectional restrictions of the different subtypes of ERC, and we contrasted it to that of native speakers of English. From an incremental and interactive processing perspective (MacWhinney & Bates, 1989; MacWhinney, 2004), we predict that as subjects’ proficiency increases, Spanish speakers would improve their representations of the syntax-semantic interface of the L2 leading to a better way of thinking for speaking in a foreign language (Slobin, 1996). In addition, the form-function interactions that overlap between L1 and L2 would be easier to learn due to interlinguistic influence. In line with our predictions, results show that Spanish native speakers showed clear differences in the accuracy (F = 14.229, p < .001) and response times (F = 8.284, p < .001) for the different ERC subtypes. In particular, the ERC closer to Spanish (ERC-Path) showed better response accuracy (p’s < .001) and shorter response times than the ERCs further from Spanish grammar (ERC-Property and ERC-Fake Reflexive) (p’s < 0.014). In addition, native speakers of English showed no significant differences in the acceptability and time response of the different conditions, which may leave construction-complexity effects aside. We interpret results in terms of the effect of the relative distance of each subtype of ERC to the Spanish event construction style. The ERC with syntactic-semantic features similar to Spanish are better identified by Spanish participants at earliest proficiency stages than those ERC with a further syntax-semantic configuration from Spanish (ERC-Property and ERC-Fake Reflexive). In addition, as proficiency increases, these differences tend to disappear and the recognition of the different constructions improves. In sum, these results attempt to contribute to the better understanding of Spanish-English contrast and to the later elaboration of specific teaching material that considers the particularities of an L1 in the acquisition of a typologically different L2.LINK para ver presentación: https://view.genial.ly/62c3574d242da20019cba97a/presentation-mkr-2022