Chapter 7
Animacy hierarchy effects on L2 processing of Differential Object
Marking
Studies on L2 processing of Differential Object Marking (DOM) are
scant and mostly focus on the animacy of the object. We investigated the
interaction of three understudied factors in L1 and L2 processing of DOM:
type of animacy (human vs. non-human animal), gender and number of the
object (masculine vs. feminine, plural vs. singular), and morphological
salience of the DOM marker (e.g., al bound/less salient vs.
a unbound/more salient). Forty-three Spanish
monolinguals and 81 English learners of Spanish (39 intermediate, 42
advanced) completed a self-paced reading task with subject relative clauses
(RCs) containing DPs with singular and plural human or animal direct object
nouns. Results showed that L2 learners’ sensitivity to animacy hierarchy
differences is possible in cognitively easy conditions (unbound DOM,
masculine gender). These findings inform current L2 representational and
processing models, and stress the value of examining multiple factors to
fully understand the complexity of DOM.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The linguistic phenomena: DOM and RCs in Spanish
- 3.Literature review
- 3.1Production and offline studies of DOM in L2 Spanish
- 3.2Online studies of DOM in L2 Spanish
- 4.The study
- 5.Methods
- 5.1Participants
- 5.2Materials and procedure
- 6.Results
- 6.1Results with singular RC objects (al vs. a la)
- 6.2Results with plural RC objects (a los vs. a las)
- 7.Discussion
- 7.1Animacy hierarchy effects
- 7.2Salience effects
- 7.3Gender effects
- 7.4L2 proficiency effects
- 8.Conclusions
-
References
-
Appendix
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