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This experimental study tests the Interface Hypothesis by looking into processes at the syntax–discourse interface, teasing apart acquisition of syntactic, semantic and discourse knowledge. Adopting López’s (2009) pragmatic features [±a(naphor)] and [±c(ontrast)], which in combination account for the constructions of dislocation and fronting, we te...
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... CLLD judgments: The mean group responses by the four participant groups in the study for the CLLD structures are given in the two parts of Figure 3. Recall that we tested sentences in four conditions: the semantic difference of equivalence or subset between discourse antecedent and dislocate were crossed with the presence or absence of a clitic. ...
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... Correct answers received one point. Participants achieving a score between 40 and 50 (the maximum obtainable score) were advanced learners, in accordance with common procedures in L2 Spanish research (e.g., Slabakova et al., 2012). All of our advanced L2 learner participants fell within this range (M = 43.88, ...
Studies exploring gender agreement processing in late bilinguals whose first language (L1) lacks the gender feature suggest that advanced second language (L2) learners can detect gender agreement violations in the L2. Importantly, these studies have mainly included gender canonical nouns (e.g., la silla, el libro). However, the specific mechanisms L2 learners use while processing L2 gender agreement are unclear: Do learners rely on morphophonological cues (i.e., gender suffix) or on their gender assignment? In this study, English advanced L2 learners of Spanish and Spanish monolinguals completed a moving window task containing sentences with canonical and deceptive nouns engaged in noun–adjective gender (dis)agreement relations (e.g., casa antigua/*o, mano rosada/*o). Results revealed that Spanish monolinguals and advanced L2 learners were sensitive to violations with canonical nouns. However, native speakers were significantly slower at computing gender disagreement than agreement with deceptive nouns, while advanced L2 learners exhibited the opposite processing pattern (i.e., they took longer to process gender agreement than disagreement with deceptive nouns). The findings suggest that native speakers seem to rely on their gender assignment, while L2 learners focus more on suffix matching patterns (i.e., if -o in the noun, -o in the adjective).
... These findings challenge older versions of the Interface Hypothesis(e.g., Sorace, 2000), which predicts instability at the syntax-discourse interface during the learning process. Contrary to Valenzuela's (2006) findings, which revealed the failure of near-native English learners to properly acquire the specificity constraint in Spanish LD (Section 2.2), Donaldson's (2011aDonaldson's ( , 2011b results are echoed by Slabakova et al. (2012) and Leal et al. (2017), two studies dedicated to LD in L2 Spanish, as well as (partly) by Silva (2012) on Portuguese LD acquisition by Spanish speakers. ...
Dislocations are syntactic constructions consisting of a core sentence and a detached constituent located outside the clause, either at its left (left dislocation) or at its right (right dislocation). Typically, although not invariably, the clause hosts a resumptive element, often a pronoun, which is co-referent with the detached constituent. This separation between an extra-clausal element and the sentence led to the classification of dislocations as “non-canonical” or “marked” syntactic structures.
Dislocations are attested in many language families, to the extent that they can be regarded as a language universal. However, these constructions have predominantly been examined in Germanic and Romance languages, both in formal and functional frameworks.
Left and right dislocations are usually analyzed as topic-marking structures, in which the referent of the detached element has the function of sentence topic. However, specific types of topics appear to preferentially occur in either left or right dislocation. For example, left dislocations often convey topic shifts and contrastive topics, while continuous (or familiar) topics are more commonly found in right dislocations. Nonetheless, corpus-based research unveiled a more nuanced situation. Furthermore, interactionally oriented studies also suggest that exploring dislocations in spontaneous conversations is crucial for comprehending their broad functional spectrum.
Thus, dislocations present many intriguing challenges to Romance linguistics, including the questions, To what extent do left and right dislocations differ syntactically and pragmatically across Romance languages? Are descriptions framed in terms of “topic establishing” and “topic promotion” truly adequate? What are the main prosodic characteristics of left and right dislocations? and What challenges do L1 and L2 learners encounter in the acquisition of these constructions?
... Clausal embedding arguably follows narrow grammatical principles. This division into structure-and discourse-related domains regarding their susceptibility to change is, however, not uniformly accepted (see Slabakova et al. 2012;Méndez et al. 2015). Moreover, the divergent behavior of HSs in different studies may be also due to the difference in their proficiency. ...
This study investigates the production of clausal embeddings by 195 Russian speakers (67 monolingually raised speakers, 68 heritage speakers in the US, and 60 heritage speakers in Germany) in different communicative situations varying by formality (formal vs. informal) and mode (spoken vs. written). Semi-spontaneous data were manually annotated for clause type and analyzed using a binomial generalized mixed-effects model. Our results show that heritage speakers of both groups and monolingually raised speakers behave alike regarding their use of embedded clauses. Specifically, all speaker groups produce embedded clauses more frequently in formal situations compared to informal situations. Mode was not found to influence the production of embedded clauses. This behavior suggests an underlying register awareness in heritage speakers of Russian. Such register awareness might be a result of the high involvement of heritage speakers with Russian. This study contributes to our understanding of linguistic outcomes of heritage speakers and highlights the influence of communicative situations on language production.
... Judy, 2015;Valenzuela, 2006), others have found that native-like knowledge of this property is attainable by L2 learners at nearnative proficiency levels (e.g. Donaldson, 2011;Slabakova, 2015;Slabakova et al., 2012; for similar findings in the L2 oral production of information focus marking in Spanish, see Leal et al., 2019). ...
It remains an open question whether second language (L2) learners can process linguistic properties at the syntax–discourse interface. This study examines this issue in the context of the L2 processing of Korean dative sentences under different information structure requirements. Given that discourse constraints associated with information structure tend to manifest more strongly in noncanonical than in canonical structures, we tested whether L2 learners of Korean show sensitivity to such constraints during online processing. In a story-continuation task, both native and nonnative speaker groups showed a strong preference for producing canonical dative patterns, indicating their comparable knowledge of the canonical status of Korean dative sentences. In a self-paced reading task, both groups spent longer reading times when the word order of dative sentences did not follow given–new information structure, but only for the noncanonical and not the canonical structure. These results suggest that L2 processing of dative structures at the syntax–discourse interface relies on the same parsing architecture that guides native-speaker processing.
... The same conclusion was reached by Donaldson (2011aDonaldson ( , 2011b in his studies on dislocation. Slabakova et al. (2012) extended Rothman's (2009) claims against the IH, as follows: 'Learners at more advanced proficiency levels will demonstrate knowledge of both the syntax and discourse-appropriateness as well as the semantic constraints on the grammatical elements' (Slabakova et al., 2012: 328). In their study Slabakova et al. (2012) examined L1 English and L2 Spanish, two languages that differ with respect to left dislocation: English, unlike Spanish, lacks clitics and clitic left dislocation (CLLD) constructions and allows only one preposing element that receives focal stress. ...
... Slabakova et al. (2012) extended Rothman's (2009) claims against the IH, as follows: 'Learners at more advanced proficiency levels will demonstrate knowledge of both the syntax and discourse-appropriateness as well as the semantic constraints on the grammatical elements' (Slabakova et al., 2012: 328). In their study Slabakova et al. (2012) examined L1 English and L2 Spanish, two languages that differ with respect to left dislocation: English, unlike Spanish, lacks clitics and clitic left dislocation (CLLD) constructions and allows only one preposing element that receives focal stress. The results of a felicity judgment task they carried out indicated that the learners at all levels were sensitive to the semantic constraints restricting the relationship between discourse antecedent and dislocate in CLLD. ...
... 2 • • Hypothesis 2: If Rothman's (2009) and Slabakova et al.'s (2012) claim that problems at the syntax-pragmatics interface may be eventually overcome at higher competence levels is correct, the advanced learners may attain native-like patterns in focus contexts, while temporary difficulty may be found at lower competence levels. Slabakova et al. (2012) further claim that the syntax-semantics interface can be mastered at higher competence levels, in which case the advanced learners will have no problems with subject position with intransitives in neutral contexts. ...
Greek and Spanish are two languages that display a similar subject distribution with unergative/unaccusative verbs, but different word orders with focused subjects (SV in Greek and VS in Spanish). Here we consider subject–verb word order in second language (L2) Greek and L2 Spanish in order to test the Interface Hypothesis (IH). To this end, we report a word-order selection task, with a Greek and a Spanish version. The two versions of the task were administered to L2 intermediate and advanced learners and native speakers of Greek and Spanish. The results show that the first language (L1) Spanish learners of Greek approximated more closely native word orders than the L1 Greek learners of Spanish. For the Spanish learners of Greek, the advanced group performed at ceiling, while the intermediate group performed native-like only with unergatives in neutral and direct interrogative subject-focused contexts. On the other hand, for the Greek learners of Spanish, the intermediate group failed in all contexts, while the advanced group performed native-like with unaccusatives in neutral contexts. This asymmetry between L2 Greek and L2 Spanish reveals that the L1–L2 combination determines the learners’ performance, and this is unexpected under the IH.
... Despite the attested observation that phenomena at the syntax-discourse interface are often acquired late, evidence for a generalized interface-related deficit is not reported; there is an increasing body of research showing successful L2 acquisition of discourse properties that are not instantiated in the learner's first language (L1) (e.g. Donaldson, 2011;Hopp, 2009;Ivanov, 2012;Iverson et al., 2008;Leal et al., 2017;Rothman, 2009;Slabakova Kempchinsky and Rothman, 2012;Smeets, 2019), as well as positive transfer of L1 properties for speakers whose L1 and L2 behave alike (Hopp, 2009;Kraš, 2008;Smeets, 2019). ...
... Additional research on the acquisition of the specificity constraint has mainly focused on DOM marking in L2 Spanish, reporting persistent difficulty for native speakers of non-DOM languages like English (Bowles and Montrul, 2009;Farley and McCollam, 2004;Guijarro-Fuentes, 2011, 2012Guijarro-Fuentes and Marinis, 2007), but not for native speakers of Romanian (Montrul, 2019) or Turkish (Montrul and Gürel, 2015) where the L1 also instantiates a specificity constraint on DOM. Slabakova et al. (2012) investigated, among other aspects, the anaphoricity constraint on Spanish CLLD. Participants provided acceptability judgments of sentences with Topic or Focus Fronting, similar to the examples in (4) and (5), where the clitic was either present or absent. ...
... Note, however, that the same effect was not attested in the WET. These results furthermore differ from those reported for the English near-native speakers of Spanish in Slabakova et al. (2012), which did show higher ratings of no-clitic sentences over cliticsentences with Focus Fronting using an almost identical design. The only difference between our task and the one in Slabakova et al. (2012) is that in the latter study, participants were asked to rate a sentence with a clitic and one without a clitic at the same time, making the presence versus absence of the clitic more salient, facilitating the experimental task. ...
This study investigates feature acquisition and feature reassembly associated with Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD). The article compares the acquisition of CLLD in second language (L2) Italian to L2 Romanian to examine effects of first language (L1) transfer, construction frequency and the type of interface involved (external vs. internal interface) within the same syntactic construction. The results from an acceptability judgment task and a written elicitation task show that while English near-native speakers of Italian/Romanian acquired the L2 constraints on CLLD, which is [+anaphor] for Italian and [+specific] for Romanian, data from both Romanian L2 learners of Italian and Italian L2 learners of Romanian showed persistent L1 transfer effects. Target-like acquisition for these groups requires both grammatical expansion and retraction; Romanian CLLD requires the addition of an L1-unavailable [+specific] feature and the loss of a [+anaphor] feature, while Italian CLLD requires the addition of an L1-unavailable [+anaphor] and the loss of a [+specific] feature. The reported findings extend evidence in favour of the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis to the syntax–discourse interface, as reassembly of interpretational features associated with CLLD proved more difficult than feature acquisition. While learners at the near-native levels were able to broaden the contexts that allow a clitic in the L2 (grammatical expansion), L1 preemption difficulties were attested as well. This was the case regardless of the frequency of the relevant construction in the input and the type of L2 feature that needed to be added/removed.
... Judy, 2015;Valenzuela, 2006), others have found that native-like knowledge of this property is attainable by L2 learners at nearnative proficiency levels (e.g. Donaldson, 2011;Slabakova, 2015;Slabakova et al., 2012; for similar findings in the L2 oral production of information focus marking in Spanish, see Leal et al., 2019). ...
It remains an open question whether second language (L2) learners can process linguistic properties at the syntax–discourse interface. This study examines this issue in the context of the L2 processing of Korean dative sentences under different information structure requirements. Given that discourse constraints associated with information structure tend to manifest more strongly in noncanonical than in canonical structures, we tested whether L2 learners of Korean show sensitivity to such constraints during online processing. In a story-continuation task, both native and nonnative speaker groups showed a strong preference for producing canonical dative patterns, indicating their comparable knowledge of the canonical status of Korean dative sentences. In a self-paced reading task, both groups spent longer reading times when the word order of dative sentences did not follow given–new information structure, but only for the noncanonical and not the canonical structure. These results suggest that L2 processing of dative structures at the syntax–discourse interface relies on the same parsing architecture that guides native-speaker processing.
... Various studies have tested the Interface Hypothesis on different types of bilingual populations, but results are mixed. While some studies have reported that bilingual speakers exhibit an incomplete acquisition of external interface phenomena (e.g., Sorace & Filiaci, 2006;Serratrice, Sorace, Filiaci, & Baldo, 2009, Domínguez, 2013among others), others have shown the opposite (e.g., Rothman, 2008;Slabakova & Ivanov, 2011;Slabakova, Rothman, & Kempchinsky, 2012;among others). Furthermore, although the literature usually agrees on the native-like attainment of internal interface phenomena (e.g., Dekydtspotter, Sprouse & Anderson, 1997;Dekydtspotter, Sprouse & Swanson, 2001;Iverson & Rothman, 2008), few studies do show incomplete acquisition of the syntax-lexicon phenomena (e.g., Bruhn de Garavito & Valenzuela, 2006;Guijarro-Fuentes & Marinis, 2007; see also White, 2003White, , 2009. ...
This paper investigates the Italian Word Order variation in the position of subjects (S) with respect to finite predicates (V) in two adult populations: L1-Italian speakers and L1-French L2-Italian speakers. We test how discourse focus (Belletti, 2001) and a decomposed approach to Unaccusativity, i.e., Unaccusativity Hierarchy (Sorace, 2000), determine the SV/VS variation in L1 and L2 populations. The results of a forced-choice preference task show that both factors constrain the Italian word order in L1 and L2 Italian speakers: the VS order was preferred in the narrow focus and with Change of Location unaccusative verbs in both populations, although with different proportions. Overall L2 speakers chose the SV order more consistently than L1 speakers but they did so mainly with the less-core unaccusative verbs of the Unaccusativity Hierarchy. We account for these findings suggesting a return to the original version of the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace, 2005), which predicts that interface phenomena, including those at the syntax-lexicon interface, represent a vulnerable domain in L2 acquisition.
... For example, if a participant was not able to select the 4 This proficiency measure contains a cloze test portion from the Diploma de Español como Lengua Extranjera and a multiple choice vocabulary section from an MLA placement test and has been used previously in a number of L2 and heritage Spanish studies (e.g., Duffield & White, 1999;Montrul, 2002Montrul, , 2004Montrul, , 2011. Groups were classified as follows: Beginner <29, Intermediate 30-39, Advanced 40-50 (see Montrul, 2011;Montrul & Slabakova, 2003;Slabakova, Kempchinsky, & Rothman, 2012). ...
This study builds on prior research on second language (L2) Spanish psych verbs, which has centered on morphosyntactic properties, by examining their syntactic distribution, which relies on lexical semantic knowledge. The fact that certain forms are licensed for some verbs, but not others, is the result of an underlying lexical semantic difference across verb classes, represented here as a difference in formal feature strength. To fully acquire the relevant grammatical distribution, L2 learners must successfully acquire (i) licensing restrictions on argument structure and (ii) underlying lexical semantic representations of individual verbs. Three groups of L2 learners ( n = 66) and a group of native Spanish speakers ( n = 19) completed two judgment tasks (one with aural stimuli and one with written stimuli) which presented object experiencer psych verbs in multiple argument structures. Results show that advanced L2 learners are largely sensitive to the distribution tested here; however, while they have acquired relevant licensing restrictions, they may associate fixed feature settings with verbs that allow variable feature settings. These results are consistent with predictions made by the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis and highlight the role of lexical semantic features in second language acquisition.
... The question of whether sentence processing in the second language (L2) is fundamentally similar or different from sentence processing in the native language (L1) has been widely debated (e.g., Clahsen & Felser, 2006;Sorace, 2011). Within the domain of information structure, whether L2 learners can comprehend focus in the same way as L1 speakers has gained considerable attention in L2 acquisition (e.g., Akker & Cutler, 2003;Liu & Lee, 2021;Ortega-Llebaria & Colantoni, 2014;Reichle & Birdsong, 2014;Slabakova et al., 2012;Zubizarreta & Nava, 2011). ...
... Previous studies mainly investigated L2 processing of focus in sentences without only (e.g., Akker & Cutler, 2003;Ortega-Llebaria & Colantoni, 2014;Reichle & Birdsong, 2014;Slabakova et al., 2012). The L2 processing of focus in only-sentences has not been systematically examined. ...
This “visual-world” eye-tracking study investigated the processing of focus in English sentences with preverbal only by L2 learners whose L1 was either Cantonese or Dutch, compared to native speakers of English. Participants heard only -sentences with prosodic prominence either on the object or on the verb and viewed pictures containing an object-focus alternative and a verb-focus alternative. We found that both L2 groups showed delayed eye movements to the alternative of focus, which was different from the native speakers of English. Moreover, Dutch learners of English were even slower than Cantonese learners of English in directing fixations to the alternative of focus. We interpreted the delayed fixation patterns in both L2 groups as evidence of difficulties in integrating multiple interfaces in real time. Furthermore, the similarity between English and Dutch in the use of prosody to mark focus hindered Dutch learners’ L2 processing of focus, whereas the difference between English and Cantonese in the realization of focus facilitated Cantonese learners’ processing of focus in English.
