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Article published In: Journal of Second Language Studies
Vol. 8:1 (2025) ► pp.24–57

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The acquisition of object drop and island sensitivity in L2 Spanish by German speakers

 | University of the Balearic Islands, Spain
 | Halmstad University, Sweden
Published online: 14 November 2024
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jsls.00035.gui
Abstract
This paper investigates German speakers of L2 Spanish and assesses their knowledge of (un)interpretable features linked to object drop in Spanish. Object drop involves an interpretable feature (i.e. definiteness) and uninterpretable features abiding by syntactic constraints leading to subjacency restrictions or Phase Impenetrability in recent Minimalist conceptions. Conversely, German argument omission is restricted to the topic position. This paper presents data from a production and grammaticality judgment task bearing on the acquisition of syntactic and semantic features associated with Spanish object drop, testing the plausibility of two prominent hypotheses, the Interpretability and Feature Reassembly Hypothesis. Results suggest that most L2 speakers have sensitivity to the D-related features associated with object-drop phenomena. Evidence lends strong favour to the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis; the main findings suggest a lack of task effect for knowledge of interpretable features which can only be accounted for by said hypothesis.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The role of feature interpretability in SLA
  • 3.Theoretical background: Comparing the Spanish and German grammar systems
  • 4.L2 research findings
  • 5.Methods
    • 5.1Participants
    • 5.2Instruments
      • Production task
      • Simple sentences without islands
      • Sentences with islands constraints
      • Grammaticality judgment task
      • Simple sentences without islands
      • Sentences with island constraints
    • 5.3Procedure
    • 5.4Scoring and statistical analysis
  • 6.Results
    • 6.1Production task
    • 6.2Grammaticality judgment task
  • 7.Discussion
  • 8.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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