<p>This project examined the
acquisition of third person accusative clitics in Spanish by Chinese-speaking
learners. Specifically, it focused on the role of cross-linguistic influence and
patterns of language exposure and use in the acquisition of the syntactic and
semantic properties constraining the production and intuition of overt and null
clitics in Spanish. An elicited production task and an acceptability judgment
task were performed on a total of 83 participants divided into four groups. A
group of Chinese immigrants in Spain (n = 24), a group of classroom learners in
China with study abroad experience (n = 23), and a group of learners without
study abroad experience (n = 19) were compared to a group of native speakers of
Spanish (n=17). The results showed that, while all the experimental groups
showed knowledge of accusative clitics, their knowledge regarding the distribution
of overt and null clitics was generally not related to definiteness or
syntactic island. However, some participants with higher proficiency or more
use of Spanish showed some sensitivity to the syntactic property of null
clitics but not definiteness. Proficiency in Spanish had different effects on
the immigrants and the classroom learners. Use of Spanish also played different
roles between the pure classroom learners and the other two groups with naturalistic
exposure. Finally, the results also showed that, while the three groups all
showed influence from Chinese, the Spanish and Chinese grammars of the
immigrants showed more similarity, compared to the two groups of classroom
learners. Based on a proposed path of
acquisition, the results were discussed in line with second language
acquisition theorizing on feature accessibility and reassembly. Some
implications on classroom instruction are also discussed. </p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:purdue.edu/oai:figshare.com:article/14502810 |
| Date | 01 June 2021 |
| Creators | Jian Jiao (10716798) |
| Source Sets | Purdue University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis |
| Rights | CC BY 4.0 |
| Relation | https://figshare.com/articles/thesis/The_Acquisition_of_Spanish_Accusative_Clitics_by_Chinese-Spanish_Bilinguals/14502810 |
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