
Ana MadeiraUniversidade NOVA de Lisboa | NOVA · Linguistics Centre (CLUNL)
Ana Madeira
PhD in Linguistics
About
37
Publications
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Introduction
I am an Associate Professor in the Linguistics Department at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities of Universidade Nova de Lisboa. My current research focuses mainly on the L2 language acquisition of morphosyntax and interface properties, with a special focus on Romance languages. I am also interested in the interfaces between language acquisition and language teaching.
Publications
Publications (37)
Este estudo investiga a aquisição de objetos nulos em português europeu (PE) como L2, utilizando uma tarefa de produção oral induzida e duas tarefas de juízos de aceitabilidade rápidos (escrita e oral). Os participantes são 25 falantes de PE L1 e 30 aprendentes adultos de espanhol L1 e PE L2 nos níveis intermédio a quase nativo. Os resultados mostr...
The research presented in this volume covers first language acquisition, second language acquisition, language heritage and language impairment. Papers in this collection use a variety of experimental methods, such as eye-tracking, elicitation tasks, production tasks administered off-line and untimed, transcriptions of spontaneous speech, productio...
This study investigates anaphora resolution in L2 European Portuguese by Italian and Spanish native speakers to examine whether learners are sensitive to microvariation among these null subject Romance languages. Participants were 25 adult L1 EP speakers, 69 L1 Italian, and 42 L1 Spanish adult learners of EP at three levels: upper–intermediate, adv...
In this paper, we investigate whether there is a correlation between the temporal properties of control verbs and the possibility of restructuring with obligatory control predicates, taking clitic climbing as a diagnostic for restructuring. We review the findings of previous studies on earlier stages of Portuguese and on (non-)standard varieties of...
This study investigates the acquisition of clitic placement in L2 EP, using an elicited oral production task and a speeded acceptability judgement task. Participants were 20 L1 EP speakers and 30 L1 Spanish-L2 EP adult learners at intermediate to near-native levels. Results show that enclisis stabilizes early (at least in production) and proclisis...
The present study investigates how adult native speakers of two null subject Romance languages, European Portuguese (EP) and Italian, interpret null and overt pronominal subjects in intrasentential contexts. Participants were 30 speakers of EP and 30 of Italian. Each language group was administered two multiple-choice tasks (speeded and untimed), w...
This study investigates the interpretation of pronominal subjects in European Portuguese, Spanish and Italian. 30 native speakers of each language completed two multiple-choice tasks (speeded and untimed), which elicited their interpretation of null and overt subject pronouns in intrasentential contexts with the order matrix‑subordinate. The tasks...
This paper has two major goals. The first one is to present a summary of some of the studies which have been conducted on the L2 acquisition of syntactic properties in European Portuguese within a generative framework, considering the research questions, the phenomena, and the learner profiles which have been investigated, the methodologies used, a...
This volume includes fourteen papers on the acquisition of Romance languages, eleven of which were presented at the Romance Turn 9, held in Bucharest in September 2018. The studies offer new insights into central issues in the literature, such as syntactic complexity in both typical and impaired language settings, intervention effects, the acquisit...
This study investigates the interpretation of subject pronouns in L2 EP by Italian native speakers, to examine the following questions: In overt subject resolution, do L1 Italian - L2 European Portuguese learners behave like L1 EP speakers regarding antecedent animacy (a property at the syntax-semantics interface) at L2 developmental stages and at...
This paper presents the L1 Portuguese – L2 Spanish subcorpus of Corpus Escrito del Español L2 (CEDEL2), a new methodological resource for second language acquisition (SLA) research, which is freely searchable and downloadable (http://cedel2.learnercorpora.com). CEDEL2 is a large-scale, multi-L1 learner corpus of L2 Spanish which contains written pr...
The present study investigates the resolution of null and overt subject pronouns in intrasentential contexts, considering the role of animacy in antecedent assignment. Participants were 15 native speakers of EP and 14 of Italian. Each language group was administered two multiple choice tasks (speeded and untimed), which had a 2x2 design, crossing t...
It is known that knowledge of the interpretative properties of the standard inflected infinitive develops late both in L1 and L2 acquisition, and that subject control with most verbs is acquired early in L1. In this study we focus on a context which has not been addressed so far, and investigate how the interpretation of the null subjects of inflec...
This study investigates the effects of two external linguistic variables – language dominance and time of formal exposure – on the production and placement of clitic pronouns of Portuguese-French bilingual children. Using two elicited production tasks and a parental sociolinguistic questionnaire, we show that language dominance plays a role in rate...
This paper investigates the interpretation preferences for null and overt subject pronouns in anaphoric and cataphoric contexts in L2 Portuguese and, specifically, whether: i) the L1 of the participants (Italian and German) influences their interpretation; ii) there is evidence of development; iii) there are differences determined by pronoun type a...
Placement tests are a form of assessment that aims at placing students in appropriate levels. Placement tests must, therefore, be based on validity and reliability arguments to ensure appropriateness and consistency of assessment. Despite the growing interest in Portuguese as a Foreign Language (PFL), both nationally and internationally, to our kno...
This study investigates clitic omission and clitic placement in Portuguese-French bilingual children. Using two elicited production tasks, we show that the global pattern of development is very similar to the one found in monolingual acquisition: bilingual children are sensitive to the type of clitic (more omission in accusative contexts than in re...
This study investigates how knowledge of the interpretative properties of strong object pronouns develops in L2 European Portuguese. We focus on the anaphor si, which, in biclausal domains, may take either a local or a long-distance antecedent. Previous studies have shown that L2 learners show delays in the acquisition of non-reflexive pronouns in...
In a questionnaire study we investigate how native speakers of European Portuguese (EP) and Chinese, as well as Chinese learners of EP as second language (L2), interpret null and overt pronouns in forward and backward anaphora. Results show that EP native speakers exhibit different interpretative biases for null and overt pronominal subjects in bot...
This study investigates the acquisition of morphosyntactic and interpretative properties of the Portuguese inflected infinitive by Chinese and Spanish speakers, using three experimental tasks. Assuming a Full Access approach (Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996) and the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace, 2011), we predict that full acquisition of the morphosyntact...
Studies on Variation in Portuguese offers a collection of studies on a range of variable phenomena attested within and across varieties of Portuguese. The volume starts out with an overview of current issues in the study of intralinguistic variation and is divided in two parts. Part 1 is dedicated to research on variation within national varieties...
This study investigates whether L2 learners of Portuguese show difficulties in the interpretation of reflexive and non-reflexive strong and clitic pronouns, and whether there are asymmetries in the establishment of referential dependencies with the reflexive ‘si’ in local and long-distance contexts. The study is based on three truth-value judgement...
This study investigates whether L2 learners of (European) Portuguese display asymmetries in their comprehension of reflexive and non-reflexive pronouns, as has been found in L2 English (e.g., Kim, Montrul & Yoon, 2014). Forty- one intermediate learners of L2 Portuguese, who were L1 speakers of Spanish, English and Chinese, completed a truth-value j...
This study investigates whether the acquisition of clitics in L2 Portuguese is characterised by high rates of omission, as has been observed in L1 acquisition. On the basis of production and comprehension data from three intermediate learner groups (speakers of English, Spanish and Chinese), we conclude that there is no evidence for a generalised o...
This chapter presents a brief overview of some of the research issues and topics which have been the object of current research on the acquisition of European Portuguese (EP) and Brazilian Portuguese (BP) as a second language (L2). It first provides a brief introduction to some of the research questions which have dominated recent L2 acquisition re...
Este estudo visa investigar a aquisição, em português europeu como segunda língua (L2), de propriedades morfo-sintácticas associadas ao valor positivo do parâmetro do sujeito nulo, por um lado, e, por outro lado, de propriedades pragmático-discursivas que determinam a distribuição de sujeitos nulos e expressos, procurando, simultaneamente, estabele...
The purpose of this thesis is to provide a detailed analysis of two phenomena in Portuguese which will be argued to crucially involve the complementiser (C) position: the inflected infinitive and pronominal clitic placement. The analysis is formulated in the Minimalist framework (Chomsky 1993, 1995). In chapter 1 I provide a brief introduction to t...
The conditions which determine the alternation between proclisis and enclisis in European Portuguese appear at first sight to be entirely different from those found in other Romance languages such as Spanish and Italian. In this paper I argue that these differences can be explained by assuming that clitic movement in European Portuguese targets a h...