7 Replies to “The Interpretation and Production of Inalienable Possession in L2 and Heritage Spanish (Laura Solano, Alejandro Cuza)”

  1. Thanks for your presentation!

    Clearly, heritage speakers’ inalienable possession systems have some very gradient characteristics. I’m not sure, however, that the gradience works in the scalar way that you propose.

    In a study that I did with Liliana Sánchez (Giancaspro & Sánchez, 2021: Glossa), we found that heritage speakers produce the third option (No Clitic + PossDet) more than they produce the second option (Clitic + PossDet). Also, the heritage speakers rated Clitic + PossDet and NoClitic + PossDet forms almost equally.

    Thanks again for your presentation!

    1. Hello David,

      Thanks for your comment. I believe the gradient behaviour observed deserves further attention. I am interested in analysing the data more to see if any pattern emerges.

      Regarding the choice of one structure over another, my thought is that there might be some differences in the items used that might have influenced the results. Also, as Becky points out below, the task type might have had something to do. Interestingly, in both studies Se+DefDet is the most produced / preferred / accepted option!

  2. Dear Laura and Alejandro,
    Thanks for a very clear presentation. This is such an interesting study and I learned a lot about patterns of use I was not aware of. Thanks so much!
    Pablo

  3. Laura (and Alex),

    Thank you for sharing this work. The presentation was very clear and thorough.

    My questions/comments relate to proficiency and task type. I was surprised to see that there was no evidence to support your hypothesis regarding proficiency, especially for the L2 learners. How was proficiency incorporated into your analysis? Was it a continuous variable? Was there much variation among proficiency scores within the L2 group?

    I wonder if the lack of a result for proficiency might be due, in part, to the fact that the results reflect preferences and use as opposed to acceptability/representation. In the absence of something like a judgment task (with sentence types presented independently), we don’t necessarily know whether the dispreferred sentence types form part of the grammars and I wonder if proficiency effects would be more apparent with that type of task. For example, we might see with higher proficiency L2 learners that they still hold a preference for null Se, but also accept Se+DefDet. I’d be very interested in your thoughts on this.

    In the absence of a proficiency effect, are there any other factors that you think could correlate with the L2 learners’ performance? (In the CPT, in particular, they clearly appear in two distinct groups.)

    Lastly, I imagine task type can account for some of the differences that David mentions above in the findings of his study, which included judgments, versus your data, which reveal preferences.

    Thanks again!
    Becky

  4. Hi Laura and Dr. Cuza, this was really interesting! I had a question about the last content slide of the presentation where the continuum of different syntactic patterns was presented. Laura – you mentioned that the lexical item (brazo vs pelo) may partially predict which syntax the HS and the other similar group use. Would you mind expanding on that idea in the comments here? I would also like to hear what kinds of lexical items frequently cooccurred with each of the four sentence types. Thanks!! Sarah

  5. Really enjoyed this presentation. Very clear and easy to follow. Congratulations!
    Also surprised to see no effect of higher/lower proficiency in Spanish (either self-reported or from an assessment) on performance.
    Keep up the good work Laura!

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