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THE SYNTAX-SEMANTICS OF ADJECTIVAL DISTRIBUTION IN ADULT POLISH-SPANISH CHILDHOOD BILINGUALS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2017

Tiffany Judy
Tiffany Judy*
Affiliation:
Wake Forest University
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Tiffany Judy, Assistant Professor, Department of Romance Languages, Wake Forest University, 323 Greene Hall Wingate Road, Winston Salem, North Carolina 27109. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

The present study examines potential age and microparametric effects in childhood bilinguals (currently adults) in an understudied language pairing, Polish-Spanish. Specifically, a Spanish group (N = 28) and a Sequential child bilingual (N = 22) and a Simultaneous bilingual (N = 8) group living in Misiones, Argentina, completed three experimental tasks assessing their knowledge of the syntactic and syntax-semantic distribution of adjectives. Results show that, despite several semantic differences related to adjective position, both experimental groups demonstrate knowledge of interpretive constraints that fall out from underlying Spanish syntax. Differences predicted as a result of crosslinguistic influence were not evidenced, yet, contrary to Polish and Spanish, the experimental groups accepted ungrammatical postnominal intensional adjectives significantly more than Spanish speakers.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 40 , Issue 2 , June 2018 , pp. 367 - 394
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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