Chapter published in:
Current Theoretical and Applied Perspectives on Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics
Edited by Diego Pascual y Cabo and Idoia Elola
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 27] 2020
► pp. 233–252

The acquisition of personal a among Chinese-speaking L2 learners of Spanish

A case for syntactic complexity

| Purdue University
| Purdue University
| Rutgers University
The present study examines the acquisition of differential object marking (dom) in Spanish among Mandarin-speaking L2 learners from China. Unlike Mandarin, which marks the direct object only in preverbal position (i.e., in SOV sentences) and is a topic-prominent language, Spanish allows dom in both simple and clitic left-dislocated (CLLD) sentences. We predicted L2 learners to have more difficulty with CLLD structures than with simple sentences due to structural complexity issues. Results from an Elicited Production task showed target-like performance in simple sentences among the L2 learners but overextension of the a-marker to contexts where it is not required in CLLD structures. The results are discussed along the lines of previous work on the effects of crosslinguistic influence and structural complexity.
Keywords: second language acquisition, Spanish , Mandarin, structural complexity, clitic left-dislocation
Published online: 04 June 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.27.11jia
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