ABSTRACT

The Spanish verbal system offers more evidence for agreement and tense than English, where morphological evidence is less robust. With a focus on the comprehension of verbal agreement morphology by child second (L2) learners of Spanish and English, we extend the Variational Learning account to L2 acquisition to investigate whether the abundance of morphological evidence for subject agreement in the target language contributes to the rate of acquisition. Participants were 32 Spanish-speaking L2 learners of English and 32 English-speaking L2 learners of Spanish ages 7;5–10;11. The children’s comprehension of verb agreement morphology in Spanish and in English was assessed with an off-line picture-sentence matching task in each language. The results show higher accuracy comprehending agreement for the children learning L2 Spanish compared to the children learning L2 English. This finding is consistent with a probabilistic approach to morphological learning and the role of morphological typology in the rate of acquisition.

摘要

西班牙的言语系统比英语的形态学证据不那么可靠，提供了更多的一致和时态证据。着眼于西班牙语和英语的第二语言学习者的口头表达形态理解，我们将变异学习帐户扩展到了第二语言习得，以调查目标语言中主体同意的大量形态学证据是否对比例产生影响的获取。参加者有32位讲西班牙语的英语第二语言学习者和32位年龄在7; 5-10; 11的西班牙英语学习者。通过对每种语言的离线图片-句子匹配任务评估儿童对西班牙语和英语的动词一致形态的理解。结果表明，与学习英语L2的孩子相比，学习英语L2的孩子有更高的理解力。这一发现与形态学学习的概率方法以及形态学类型学在获取率中的作用相一致。