This study investigates the acquisition of gender agreement between determiner- noun-adjective by Spanish L2 speakers whose L1 is Dutch, and tests the effect of language proficiency by comparing...Show moreThis study investigates the acquisition of gender agreement between determiner- noun-adjective by Spanish L2 speakers whose L1 is Dutch, and tests the effect of language proficiency by comparing beginner- intermediate- advanced Dutch speakers of Spanish. Earlier research on second language acquisition, like research on the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Hwang and Lardiere 2013; Lardiere 2009) that states that acquisition of uninterpretable features like grammatical gender pose difficulty, together with the differences between languages when it comes to their gender systems, have led to this study. Both Dutch and Spanish have grammatical gender with a binary system. This system is particularly transparent in Spanish gender, since nouns ending in –o tend to be masculine and nouns ending in –a feminine. Whereas in Dutch the gender system is less transparent, based on common gender (de) or neuter gender (het). Given this background, how is the acquisition of gender agreement between determiner- noun- adjective by Spanish L2 speakers whose L1 is Dutch? Comparing beginner, intermediate and advanced Dutch L2 learners of Spanish, which has been done in earlier investigations on English L2 learners of Spanish (Sagarra and Herschensohn 2011), gives us an insight on the effect of proficiency. I used the Leiden Learner Corpus (LLC), a collection of data from Dutch learners of Romance languages to extract determiner- noun-adjective combinations, produced by Dutch speaking participants who are studying Spanish as their L2 or L3 at Leiden University (n= 27; 10 beginners, 6 intermediate and 11 advanced). An overall better performance on gender agreement by higher proficiency levels was found. The performance on gender agreement between determiner- noun was better than the performance on gender agreement between determiner- noun- adjective. This research creates a new angle on the acquisition of gender agreement between the determiner- noun- adjective structure because it is the first study on a new language pair: Dutch- Spanish.Show less
Objectives: This thesis is a replication study of previous work on Spanish-English code-switching (Stadthagen-González, Parafita Couto, Párraga and Damian, 2017) and focuses on comparative...Show moreObjectives: This thesis is a replication study of previous work on Spanish-English code-switching (Stadthagen-González, Parafita Couto, Párraga and Damian, 2017) and focuses on comparative judgments, with regard to adjective-noun order in Papiamento-Dutch code-switched utterances. It examines the predictions of adjective-noun order derived from two different theoretical models: the Minimalist Program (Cantone & MacSwan, 2009) and the Matrix Language Framework (Myers-Scotton, 2002). In Dutch, adjectives are prenominal, like ‘zwarte hond’ (‘black dog’), whereas in Papiamento, adjectives are mostly post-nominal, as in ‘kachó pretu’ (literally: ‘dog black’). The Matrix Language Framework (MLF) posits that the word order in code-switched sentences must follow the word order of the Matrix Language (determined by finite verb morphology) (Myers-Scotton, 2002). However, according to Cantone and MacSwan (2009) within the Minimalist Program (MP), the word order depends on the adjective’s language. Methodology and analysis: To evaluate these predictions, 10 monolingual base sentences were modified into 40 code-switched items, consistent with the MP, the MLF, with both or none of the theoretical models. Data was gathered by a 2-Alternative Forced Choice (2AFC) task, concentrating explicitly on switches in adjective-noun word order and was analysed using Thurstone’s Law of Comparative Judgment (Thurstone, 1927). Conclusions: Results of the thirty-seven bilinguals that participated in this experiment, indicate that both the language of the verb as well as the language of the adjective are used to determine word order in code-switched sentences and these results do not differ much from those of the similar study regarding Spanish-English bilinguals (Stadthagen-González et.al., 2017). Evidence showed that neither of the two theoretical models can fully account for the acceptability of adjective-noun switches. Implications: A suggestion would be to combine the insights of both the Minimalist Program and the Matrix Language Framework to be able to understand grammaticality in code-switching, as already proposed by Stadthagen-González et.al., (2017).Show less
