Crosslinguistic Influences in the Acquisition of Spanish L3.
Patricia Bayona
This paper is based on my doctoral dissertation where I examined written production in L3 Spanish in learners with a typologically similar L2 (French) and a typologically more distant L1 (English). The corpus of the study consisted of un-aided compositions produced by participants who have English as a first language and French as a second language. The innovative methodology focused on the statistical analysis of the combination of two tools: a linguistic profile and an error database. The linguistic profile provided data regarding the language acquisition history of the subjects as well as a self-assessment of their level of exposure to the second and third languages. The error database was compiled through the analysis of error of the subjects’ compositions, while considering only the crosslinguistic influences amongst the participants’ linguistic repertoire. It was found that there is a number of strong links between the characteristics of the written production and the level of exposure to the L2 that the learners declare to have had. In other words we were able to establish a series of correlations between the amount of exposure to the L2 and the number of CLI in the L3 (Bayona, 2009).
The findings of the study confirm that learners of foreign languages are simultaneously activating their previously learned languages lexicon at the moment of producing a written text in an L3 (See also Cenoz et al, 2003), and that their social and academic background are influential factors in the production of crosslinguistic influences.
Patricia Bayona
This paper is based on my doctoral dissertation where I examined written production in L3 Spanish in learners with a typologically similar L2 (French) and a typologically more distant L1 (English). The corpus of the study consisted of un-aided compositions produced by participants who have English as a first language and French as a second language. The innovative methodology focused on the statistical analysis of the combination of two tools: a linguistic profile and an error database. The linguistic profile provided data regarding the language acquisition history of the subjects as well as a self-assessment of their level of exposure to the second and third languages. The error database was compiled through the analysis of error of the subjects’ compositions, while considering only the crosslinguistic influences amongst the participants’ linguistic repertoire. It was found that there is a number of strong links between the characteristics of the written production and the level of exposure to the L2 that the learners declare to have had. In other words we were able to establish a series of correlations between the amount of exposure to the L2 and the number of CLI in the L3 (Bayona, 2009).
The findings of the study confirm that learners of foreign languages are simultaneously activating their previously learned languages lexicon at the moment of producing a written text in an L3 (See also Cenoz et al, 2003), and that their social and academic background are influential factors in the production of crosslinguistic influences.
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Copula omission in the English grammar of English-Spanish bilinguals: a “transfer” account
A. Alba de la Fuente, University of Ottawa
R. Fernández Fuertes, Universidad de Valladolid
J. M. Liceras, Universidad de Ottawa
The debate on whether the omission of subjects in child language is to be accounted for syntactically (Hyams and Wexler 1993) or is the result of a processing deficit (Valian 1991, Valian and Eisenberg 1996) has been extrapolated to copula omission by Becker (2002, 2004). This author argues that the differences in the use of overt copula be versus null copula be in child English rather than being a product of sentence length are determined by the semantic nature of the predicate as in (1) versus (2).
(1) lady __ on that (Nina, 2;02) (2) this is lady (Naomi, 2;02)
Locative predicates, as the Prepositional Phrase in (1), are aspectual and it is their Aspectual Phrase that provides temporal anchoring to the sentence (Guéron and Hoekstra 1995). This results in the possibility of using null be with these types of predicates. However, Nominal predicates, like the Noun Phrase in (2), are not aspectual and, therefore, copula be must be explicit to ensure temporal anchoring.
As for copula be with adjective predicates as in (3) and (4), these predicates could be considered Locative or Nominal (Stage-Level or Individual-Level, following Carlson 1977 and Schmitt and Miller’s 2007 terminology) depending on the type of adjective and on the context, so that (3) would contain a Locative/Stage-Level predicate, while (4) a Nominal/Individual-Level one. In this case, even though the results were less clear-cut and individual differences occurred both quantitatively and qualitatively, the stage-level predicate (3) versus the individual-level predicate (4) dichotomy parallels the Locative/Nominal one.
(3) I __ hungry (Leo, 2;11) (4) Elmo is blue (Simon, 2;05)
In this paper, we provide an analysis of the copula in the developing English grammar of two English/Spanish simultaneous bilingual children in order to address the following issues: 1) whether a grammar-based or a processing-based approach best accounts for child omissions; 2) whether our data mirror the ones discussed by Becker with respect to the differences between Locative and Stage-level predicates versus Nominal and Individual level predicates; 3) whether the differences and similarities are shaped by the fact that Spanish copula is realized by two lexical items: estar (for cases like those in (1) and (3) above) and ser (for cases like those in (2) and (4) above); in other words, whether interlinguistic influence (Hulk and Müller 2000; Paradis and Navarro 2003) can be found in this specific area of grammar.
We have analyzed longitudinal data from the two bilingual children which cover the same age and MLU counts as in the four children in Becker’s (2004) study. An analysis of our data shows that: (i) a grammatical account is favoured over a processing one when the length of the utterances is measured as a word count; (ii) even though there are some similarities in the overall omission patterns with respect to the Locative/Nominal predicate dichotomy, the results are never significant. In the case of the Stage/Individual-level predicates, our data are even less transparent than the monolingual data: in fact our two children display opposite patterns of omission; and (iii) the lexical transparency of Spanish copula estar seems to play a role in the need to incorporate the inflectional level and, therefore, in the copula omission pattern, since our children’s rate of omission is significantly lower than the rate of omission displayed by Becker’s monolingual children.