A central issue in second language acquisition (SLA) research is the relationship between morphosyntactic and lexical-semantic knowledge among L2 learners. It has been proposed that, L2 language acquisition starts with transfer of L1 semantic and morphosyntactic processing strategies; however, it has been observed that, at lower proficiency levels, the language processor may not have sufficient resources to transfer and use L1 morphosyntactic cues such as agreement morphology, case markers, etc. to process the L2. Therefore, this dissertation investigates whether L2 learners default to more local and lexical-semantic parsing (i.e. universal parsing) at the beginning stages of second language acquisition. This dissertation examines the processing strategies of two groups of L2 learners (L1 English - L2 Spanish and L1 Spanish - L2 English) on two experimental tasks: a self-paced listening task and a sentence interpretation task. The results suggest that L1 transfer does not occur at the beginning stages of acquisition; that is, the beginning L2 learners in this study were not able to process agreement cues; thus, they did not demonstrated the ability to integrate grammatical information encoded in verbal morphology in real time processing. Instead, the results indicated that L2 learners, regardless of L1, defaulted to local and lexical-semantic strategies (e.g., first-noun strategy) to process the L2 at the beginning stages of acquisition. These results lend support to the First Noun Principle (VanPatten 2007) and are discussed in term of the representational and processing problem of L2 acquisition. Implications for models of L2 sentence processing (Input Processing and the Competition Model) are also presented in this dissertation. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Modern Languages in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2013. / December 7, 2012. / English, L2, Processing, SLA, Spanish, transfer / Includes bibliographical references. / Michael J. Leeser, Professor Directing Dissertation; Sande Milton, University Representative; Carolina Gonzalez, Committee Member; Lara Reglero, Committee Member; Gretchen Sunderman, Committee Member.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_183671 |
| Contributors | Brandl, Anel (authoraut), Leeser, Michael J. (professor directing dissertation), Milton, Sande (university representative), Gonzalez, Carolina (committee member), Reglero, Lara (committee member), Sunderman, Gretchen (committee member), Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics (degree granting department), Florida State University (degree granting institution) |
| Publisher | Florida State University, Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, text |
| Format | 1 online resource, computer, application/pdf |
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