This Master thesis examines the L2 acquisition of Spanish reflexive passives and reflexive impersonals by French and English-speaking adults at the University of Ottawa. Reflexive passives and reflexive impersonals have been chosen over other constructions because they are superficially very similar and possess an idiosyncratic lexical, morphological, and syntactic behavior: no equivalent of these constructions exist in English or French, which may entangle their acquisition. Subjects in this study included two experimental groups made up of 13 native speakers of English and 16 native speakers of French, and one control group made up of 27 native speakers of Spanish. The two experimental groups were first administered a grammaticality judgment tasks of 64 questions, after which they were provided with 3 hours of explicit grammatical instruction on reflexive passives and reflexive impersonals. A second grammaticality judgment task was administered one week after instruction. The results of the two grammaticality judgment tasks were compared to the results of one grammaticality judgment task completed by the Control group. The performance of subjects on both tasks indicated that explicit grammatical instruction had some impact on the L2 acquisition of reflexive passives and reflexive impersonals, though this influence was not found to be significant on every sentence type. The findings also revealed that the subjects' L1 (French and English) had an effect on the L2 acquisition of both constructions on items where transfer from L1 to Spanish was possible.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/6249 |
| Date | January 2002 |
| Creators | Tremblay, Annie. |
| Contributors | Munoz-Liceras, Juana, |
| Publisher | University of Ottawa (Canada) |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 145 p. |
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