Colloquium - Dr. Tania Leal; University of Arizona Spanish and Portuguese department

Our study centers on the acquisition of L2 French prenominal possessives by L1 English and L1 Spanish learners. Unlike English, which displays gender “agreement” with possessors, French and Spanish encode it with possessums. Prior research has examined L1 transfer but mainly with so-called “semantic agreement” languages like English or German. This study fills the gap by testing syntactic agreement in French. The Bottleneck Hypothesis, however, predicts difficulties with French possessives, regardless of L1. In two tasks (self-paced reading and fill-in-the-blank), French native speakers performed at ceiling, while learners struggled, especially with different gender contexts. Results show that morphology poses significant challenges in acquisition, supporting the Bottleneck Hypothesis (Slabakova, 2018). Both L1 English and L1 Spanish learners displayed persistent difficulties with gender agreement, particularly in online processing tasks like self-paced reading. These findings emphasize the challenges learners face in mastering French morphological structures despite L1-L2 similarities or differences.

 

Dr. Leal has kindly made herself available for meetings in the afternoon before the colloquium. If you would like to meet with her, please sign up here.