In:

Collentine, J.G. 2000. "The Relationship between Syntactic and Morphological Abilities in FL Learners of Spanish." In R. Leow and C. Sanz (Eds.) Spanish Applied Linguistics at the Turn of the Millennium, 20-35. Sommerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

 

The Relationship between Syntactic and Morphological

Abilities in Advanced FL Learners of Spanish

Joseph Collentine

Northern Arizona University

 

Introduction

Tschirner (1996) has argued recently that the grammatical structures of first- and second-year college foreign-language (FL) textbooks have changed little in the past two decades. Finnemann (1987) critically examines the array of grammatical constructs that the Spanish FL curriculum typically includes, surmising that it "imparts a faulty notion of language structure" (p. 37). Finnemann argues that the Spanish curriculum's focus on the language's morphological systems coveys a biased and fragmented view of the grammatical abilities learners will need to become proficient.

The Spanish FL curriculum has dedicated an extraordinary amount of curricular efforts to promote learners' knowledge of the subjunctive (cf. Collentine, 1993; Terrell, Baycroft, and Perrone, 1987). Collentine (1995) attempts to assess the efficacy of such efforts, examining the abilities of FL students of Spanish to generate the subjunctive at the completion of the intermediate level. His data suggest that, in speech, these learners exhibit little benefit from these efforts. Noting that the subjunctive's distribution is largely limited to subordinate clauses, Collentine (1995) as well as Pereira (1996) observe that learners completing the intermediate-level of instruction possess poor syntactic abilities, proposing that subjunctive instruction might be more effective if it were complemented with instructional efforts aimed at fostering learners' abilities to process complex syntax. Indeed, as Long and Crooks (1992) note, even when instruction focuses on a particular structure, learners find that it exists in a "symbiotic relationship" (p. 31) with other grammatical phenomena. Long and Crook urge educators be more mindful of such symbiotic relationships when designing their syllabi.

No research to date has studied the relationship between the abilities of FL learners of Spanish to process verbal morphology (e.g., person/number, tense/aspect) and syntax relating to basic sentence/clause structure (e.g., intraclausal word order, subordination strategies). And, the available second-language acquisition (SLA) literature provides scant empirical insights. The present investigation addresses this dearth by examining the abilities of relatively advanced learners of Spanish. If the study uncovers that the relationship between these two basic abilities is robust beyond the initial stages of acquisition, it would be productive to study the interaction of complex syntactic and morphological structures of the type that Collentine (1995) and Pereira (1996) study.

 

The Relationship between the Development of Morphological and Syntactic Abilities

The 1970s and 1980s saw a plethora of studies detailing the order in which learners acquire various grammatical entities. R. Ellis (1987) summarized the findings of these studies, surmising that learners generally progress through four sequential stages: (1) the development of basic syntactic knowledge, such as SVO in English; (2) the acquisition of variant word order, such as knowing that subject-verb inversion equates to question formation; (3) the development of morphological knowledge; and, (4) the acquisition of knowledge relating to complex sentence structure.

Bardovi-Harlig and Bofman (1989) specifically studied the relationship between the acquisition of interlanguage (IL) morphology and syntax. They compared the syntactic and morphological errors of advanced learners of English, concluding that these learners committed fewer syntactic than morphological errors. Bardovi-Harlig and Bofman (1989) reasoned that, when the L1 and the L2 are Indo-European languages such as English, German, and Spanish, syntax develops before morphology because syntax enjoys greater crosslinguistic "stability" than morphology. That is, structurally speaking, there are greater syntactic similarities between Indo-European languages than morphological similarities, which may produce an accelerated rate of syntactic acquisition as compared to morphology.

There are two competing explanations for these observations. The perspective referred to here as the syntactic foundation position contends that the acquisition of certain syntactic knowledge establishes the conditions for the acquisition of verbal morphology. The perspective referred to here as the processing position suggests (1) that syntax outpaces morphology due to L1-L2 transfer effects (when the L1 is English and Spanish is the L2) and (2) that any symbiotic relationship is not as important as the effects of memory constraints during the development of syntactic and morphological abilities.

The syntactic foundation position accounts for the patterns observed by R. Ellis (1987) and Bardovi-Harlig and Bofman (1989) with the theory of Universal Grammar--UG--(cf. Cook, 1994). Syntactic knowledge resides at the core of UG whereas morphological knowledge resides at the periphery. Thus, if UG is accessible to the adult acquiring a FL, s/he possesses a more powerful set of developmental principles for syntax than for morphology, and so it is not unreasonable to observe accelerated syntactic development. Furthermore, a central tenet of UG is the structure dependency principle: one does not combine words and morphemes with great freedom; instead, their usage is limited to particular syntactic environments (e.g., campo cannot serve as a verb). Accordingly, if a learner has not developed the syntactic knowledge that surrounds the use of a given morpheme, the learner may attend to it marginally in input or s/he may not contemplate using that morpheme in production.

SLA research informed by UG predicts that one's IL grammar will not generate verbal morphology until it can generate certain phrase-structure constituents. The Gradual Development Hypothesis (cf. Vainikka & Young-Scholten, 1994, 1996) posits that learners do not initially generate functional projections such as IP, a constituent that carries information such as person, tense, and mood. Consequently, one cannot expect a learner's competence to intentionally produce certain morphology (which is not the case when one generates a formulaic chunk; e.g., Me gusta estudiar español) until the IL starts to encode utterances with the requisite syntactic structure.

Skiba and Dittmar (1992) examine the grammaticalization of syntactic and morphological knowledge in L2 learners of German. Skiba and Dittmar observe that learners' sensitivity to certain morphological features follows an important advancement in their syntactic abilities, namely, after they abandon the basic TOPIC-COMMENT word order (e.g., Juan…listo y simpático) in favor of a SUBJECT-PREDICATE strategy (e.g., Juan es listo y simpático). These researchers document that it is only once learners enter the SUBJECT-PREDICATE stage that they "try to modify verb forms morphologically" (p. 339). Skiba and Dittmar posit that the morphological systems develop out of the assignment of syntactic features to individual lexical items, such as the assignment of [+N,-V] to terms such as casa and [-N,+V] to trabaja.

The processing position stems from the application of Connectionism--a theory of learning with roots in the field of cognitive psychology--to SLA. Connectionism theorizes that generalized principles of learning rather than innate, language-specific principles (e.g., UG) account for acquisition (cf. N. Ellis, 1999). The connectionist perspective makes two principal predictions about SLA. First, the learner uses his or her L1 as a model for comprehending and forming sentences (MacWhinney, 1996). Second, where the L1 does not provide good models, memory stores such as episodic memory, working memory, and phonological memory play a central role in processing utterances and building an L2 grammatical system (N. Ellis, 1996).

Initially, for the native English speaker, since Spanish and English share many syntactic and few morphological features, syntactic development in Spanish will be accelerated whereas morphological development will be slow. However, the learner will eventually be confronted with evidence that English syntactic frames are not entirely reliable models for Spanish, and so some reorganization will occur (N. Ellis, 1996). At this point, the connectionist perspective appears to predict, in contradistinction to UG, that knowledge of TL morphology establishes conditions for the acquisition of complex syntactic knowledge (e.g., knowledge of how to form a dependent clause in the TL), since determining that a given string represents a syntactic frame depends on one's ability to parse the string's lexical and morphological features:

"It is difficult to separate the acquisition of formal marking systems [i.e., morphology] from the overall syntactic system of a language. Perhaps the easiest way to think of the relation is to realize that syntax uses both local morphological markings and non-local word order or configurational patterns to express a variety of underlying concepts and meanings." (MacWhinney, 1996, p. 311) 1

The difficulty in separating syntactic from morphological abilities reflects the connectionist assumption that syntax and morphology are not strictly modularized, neurologically speaking (MacWhinney, in press). That is, linguistic knowledge is stored in associative neurological networks. Thus, while nativist perspectives such as UG theorize that syntactic knowledge is encapsulated (i.e., the processing of syntax is not affected by one's knowledge of morphology; cf., Fodor, 1983), connectionists predict that any meaningful clustering of linguistic knowledge is possible, such that it is plausible to posit that syntactic and morphological knowledge for comprehending and generating complex utterances is neurologically localized.

Connectionist accounts of SLA predict that certain types of short-term memory (STM) play especially critical roles in the development of knowledge of syntactic and non-local morphological structures. For example, an important mechanism in the development of both syntactic and verbal morphological knowledge is phonological short-term memory (PSTM). Learners analyze and compare PSTM chunks to chunks stored in long-term memory (LTM) in order to extrapolate generalizations about the TL's grammatical system (N. Ellis, 1996; MacWhinney, 1982). Another important mechanism is working memory (King & Just, 1991). The referents for person/number morphemes are often only retrievable upon an examination of a given discourse's or a situation's so-called thematic nodes, or slots in episodic memory that represent the actors/objects in a discourse or situation (Givón, 1990). These STM stores, whose capacity increases as the chunks of information that one can store there increase in size, are particularly important to consider in the acquisition of Spanish as a FL, as Spanish verbal morphology places "heavy demands on working memory and phonological rehearsal" (MacWhinney, 1996, pp. 311-312).

 

The Study

The present study attempts to determine whether, beyond the intermediate-level of instruction, morphological and syntactic abilities exist in a symbiotic relationship. To that end, it asks two questions:

1. Do advanced learners of Spanish possess better abilities to comprehend syntax relating to basic sentence/clause structure (e.g., intraclausal word order, subordination strategies) than abilities to comprehend basic verbal morphology (e.g., person/number, tense)?

2. Regarding these structures, is there a discernable relationship between the syntactic and morphological abilities of these learners?

To address the first question, this study compared the abilities of advanced learners of Spanish to decode basic syntactic and morphological features in aural discourse. The author chose these features under the assumption that, if a relationship exists between elemental morphosyntactic constructs, it is reasonable to explore whether similar relationships exist between more complex morphosyntactic constructs. To address the second question, the author examined correlations between the participants' syntactic and morphological behaviors. Two patterns would support the syntactic foundation position: (1) the learners' syntactic abilities are superior to their morphological abilities; and, (2) uniformly, the former are significant predictors of the latter. Support for the processing position would result from two observations: (1) in advanced stages of development, one would expect to encounter learners employing their L1 syntactic knowledge to a lesser extent than in early stages, and so syntactic abilities with these basic constructs at an advanced stage should not be significantly better than morphological abilities; and, (2) syntactic performance is a predictor of morphological performance where both involve non-local dependencies.

Targeted structures. The study assessed the participants' abilities to decode two syntactic and two morphological structures in aural input. Concerning morphology, the task prompted the learners to decode two types of verbal inflections. The study gauged the participants' abilities to decode what is termed here referential morphology. Questions testing such abilities asked the participants to determine who/what the subject of a sentence was. (See Tasks below for a description of the types of questions posed.) To do so, it is presumed that the learner needed to execute two primary processes: (1) determine that the verb's surrounding clause contains no overt subject; (2) examine the person/number inflection of the clause's verb to determine the referent for that subject, which was either introduced lexically further back in the discourse (at least one sentence) or represented graphically for the learner. For instance, a participant might see a graphic of a boy and two girls, where the boy says: Van a comer ahora. A correct decoding of van indicates that 'girls' is the referent of the verbal inflection. Sentences gauging these abilities involved verbs in the present-tense indicative.

The experiment also measured the participants' abilities to decode the morphological construct termed here temporal morphology. Relevant questions probed the participants' ability to determine the time frame of an event by properly decoding the tense/aspect morpheme of a clause's verb. Consider the following: Ayer hubo una fiesta pero hoy hay una reunión del profesorado. Elena se aburrió, la pobrecita. If a student identifies that aburrió encodes preterit morphology, s/he determines that Elena's boredom is a state of the past rather than the present. Sentences gauging these abilities involved verbs in the present-tense indicative, the preterit, and the imperfect.

Regarding syntax, the task induced the participants to decode the functions--e.g., subject, complement--of nouns in a given clause (without the help of verbal inflectional clues); the task also prompted the learners to determine the hierarchical relationship between two clauses of a given sentence. The study attempted to measure the participants' abilities to decode intraclausal syntactic constructs, asking them to indicate who or what they identified to be the subject and complement(s) of a given clause. To complete such tasks, a learner ostensibly needed to (1) identify a clause's nominal constituents, (2) consider which nominal constituent is preceded by a personal or dative a (and a concomitant indirect-object pronoun), and, based on such identifications, (3) thereupon assign the roles of subject and complement to each constituent (where the verbal morphology offers no clue as to which nominal constituent is the likely subject). For example, a proper decoding of A Elena asustó Paco would require the learner to identify Paco as the sentence's agent and Elena as its complement.

Finally, the experiment assessed the participants' abilities to decode interclausal syntactic constructs. Questions targeting these abilities asked the participants to determine the referent for a coordinate/subordinate clause's subject. Yet, to do so, the task was designed so that the learner could not depend on that clause's person/number inflection. Instead, it is presumed that the learner needed to execute three processes, the third being critical in the identification of a clause's subject: (1) determine that the verb's surrounding clause contains no overt subject; (2) determine that the clause's subject is not readily recoverable by matching the person/number inflection with a referent stored in working memory; and, (3) take into account the syntactic frame of the sentence in which the clause resides. Consider: El día del examen, Juan llegó a la escuela y se encontró con su amiga, María. Ella se dio cuenta de que estaba enfermo y que necesitaba estudiar. The subordinating conjunction que reveals that, like estaba enfermo, the proposition necesitaba estudiar resides in a dependent rather than an independent clause, and so Juan is the likely candidate for its subject. As an additional example, consider: Juan y Paquito jugaban en el jardín. De repente, Paquito lo golpeó y empezó a llorar. According to Givón (1993), when a coordinated clause is (1) immediately concatenated with another via a coordinating conjunction, (2) possesses a null subject, and (3) possesses the same verbal morphology as that of the preceding clause, the second clause is considered to be structurally parallel to the first, and so the first and second subjects are one and the same. Thus, the learner would need to identify Paquito as the subject of empezó a llorar.

It is important to recognize that, concerning items measuring abilities to decode referential morphology, intraclausal syntactic constructs, and interclausal syntactic constructs, the task posed questions probing the participants' abilities to process similar linguistic cues. In all three cases, a student needed to notice that a clause contained a null subject. Additionally, when measuring abilities to decode referential morphology and interclausal syntactic cues, the participants needed to contemplate the person/number inflection of the clause's verb. Yet, this is largely unavoidable when the TL is Spanish, since identifying syntactic constituents in Spanish requires one to consider the combination of a string's word order (which, for Spanish, is a weak cue in any event since it is highly synthetic) and its morphological cues. Still, if the data reveal that the learners' performance with these three factors was uniformly parallel, then it will be reasonable to conclude that the study failed to isolate the participants' knowledge of the constructs. Otherwise, it will be reasonable to conclude that the study at least partially isolated the learner's abilities with each of these three constructs.

The participants. The learners volunteering for the study were 36 third-year, university-level Spanish FL majors enrolled in an advanced composition course. The study took place five weeks into the Spring semester of 1999. All of the participants had studied Spanish as a FL in high school (M = 2.4 years, sd = 1.1) and at least two semesters of university-level Spanish (M = 3.8 semesters, sd = 1.3). The group consisted of 19 males and 17 females (c 2 = 0.74; p = 0.38). A baseline group of 7 native speakers of Spanish also participated in the study's tasks. All native speakers were born and educated (minimally, up through the high school level) in a Spanish speaking country.

Tasks.2 The study involved three tasks: (1) an assessment task, measuring the participants' abilities with the four morphosyntactic constructs (see Targeted structures); (2) a listening-comprehension task, testing the participants' general abilities to comprehend aural Spanish; (3) a grammar test, gauging the participants' overall syntactic and morphological abilities in Spanish. The author utilized the results of the listening and grammar tasks to determine the extent to which these abilities might account for their performance on the assessment task.

The assessment task was a computer-based instrument designed by the present author. Before the assessment task, the learners were told that the procedure assessed their abilities to comprehend aural Spanish. The task involved 24 situations, 6 for each of the four targeted structures. Each situation consisted of a graphic and an aural description of 10 to 20 seconds. For instance, a situation gauging knowledge of referential morphology might present the following graphic and a student would hear the passage below.

 

Figure 1. Sample graphic from the assessment task and a transcription of its aural descriptor.

Transcription of aural descriptor: Era un sábado, el día en que Ana normalmente lavaba la ropa. Esta vez, decidió Carlos lavar todo. Pero Ana no le tenía mucha paciencia. Vio lo que Carlos hacía y le dijo: ´Vete de aquíª.

 

A participant could listen to a description twice, after which s/he responded to a comprehension question (type written on the screen) by selecting one of three choices. (As will be seen below, the analysis factored in possible effects for the frequency with which a participant listened to a given passage.) A participant could not read a question and its possible answers until s/he indicated that s/he had finished listening to the aural descriptor. A participant saw the graphic while answering a question.

Because the targeted structures were arguably basic for third-year university-level FL learners (e.g., present-tense, person/number inflections), the assessment task employed two mechanisms to protect the study from ceiling effects. First, graphic support facilitates comprehension greatly, and learners appear to use visual organizers to make predictions about the contents of an aural passage, especially if one's TL grammatical and lexical abilities are weak (Omaggio, 1986). Thus, the researcher selected graphics that were vague with respect to their aural content. For instance, in a situation targeting abilities to decode referential morphology, a graphic would represent the possible referents for a verbal inflection but it would not depict the referents' actions. Second, the aural passages contained abrupt topic changes. The following passage was supported by a graphic depicting a young man asking for the hand of a young lady in the presence of his parents: Era la casa de la familia Ramírez. Juan estaba acompañado de Ana, su novia, y de sus padres. Y claro, sentía tremenda satisfacción hoy. Ana, después de escuchar los deseos de Juan, le dijo: ´Me casaré contigo sólo si encuentran más dineroª. Juan le aseguró: ´No habrá ningún problema.ª. In the absence of a discourse marker indicating a topic change, social conventions would lead one to expect the subject of encontrar to be second-person singular (i.e., Juan) rather than the parents, which the third-person plural inflection suggests.

The assessment task posed all questions and provided answers in simple Spanish sentences and phrases, thus minimizing L1 transfer effects. The question corresponding to Figure 1 was: ¿Cómo comenzó el día?, probablemente. The following three sentences were the possible answers, with choice (a) being the targeted response: (a) Carlos dijo, ´Yo voy a lavar la ropa esta vez.ª; (b) Ana le dijo a Carlos, ´Tú lavas la ropa esta vez.ª; (c) Ana dijo, ´No quiero lavar la ropa esta vez.ª.

The analysis of the assessment task data utilized the results of the listening-comprehension exam and the multiple-choice grammar test to partially control for the effects of the participants' overall Spanish abilities. The listening-comprehension task, completed immediately before the assessment task, was computer based and it measured the participants' abilities to decipher the main ideas and details of aural passages in Spanish. The participants listened to 16 authentic digital-video clips, 8 of which were short (less than 10 seconds in all) and 8 of which were long (ranging between 20 to 30 seconds). The application posed all questions in English and allowed the participants to choose one of three answers. The participants could not listen to a segment after having prompted its corresponding question. The multiple-choice grammar test was administered at the beginning of the semester in which the experiment was conducted. Each of the members of the baseline native-speakers group completed the grammar test one week prior to the assessment task. The grammar test assessed the participants' abilities to complete sentences with appropriate verb forms, pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions, and a variety of other miscellaneous items.

An examination of the participants' performance on the 24 assessment-task items revealed that, on some items, the participants performed poorly across the board. Accordingly, the author submitted the participants' scores to an item analysis, calculating for each item a discrimination value (cf. Hopkins, Stanley, & Hopkins, 1990). Subsequently, the author trimmed down the analysis to 12 reasonably discriminating items, with each of the 4 targeted structures being represented by 3 items.

Since the length of the aural passages for items on the assessment task varied from 10 to 20 seconds, the author conducted two additional analyses on the 12 remaining experimental items. The author calculated the number of words and the seconds per situation. Analyses of variance (ANOVAs) revealed that the aural passages for each of the four targeted structures were reasonably equal in terms of word length [F (3,8) = 2.08; p = .181] and time length [F (3,8) = 2.08; p = .181] per passage.

Variables. The analysis involved two procedures. First, to measure the effect for type of targeted structure (research question 1), the author submitted the results to an unbalanced multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA). The MANCOVA involved four dependent variables, one for the participants' performance on each of the targeted structures. The metric was the participants' proportion of correct responses. The analysis entailed a single independent variable, group, which comprised two levels: one represented the performance of the learners and the other the performance of the native speakers. The fact that the two groups differed in size required that the analysis of variance be unbalanced. The MANCOVA entailed three covariates: (1) the participants' scores on the listening-comprehension task; (2) their scores on the grammar task; and, (3) the number of times that each participant listened to an aural passage on the assessment task. Second, to measure the relationship between the participants' syntactic and morphological abilities (research question 2), the author submitted their performance on the targeted structures to correlation analyses. The data sets were the residual values for each dependent variable (generated by the MANCOVA), representing the participants' performance independent of the covariates.

Results. The analysis of the data suggests a negative answer to the first research question, indicating that the learners' abilities to decode basic sentence/clause structure were not superior to their abilities to decode basic verbal morphology. This conclusion is based on two observations. First, the MANCOVA found no main effect for group [Wilk's lambda = 0.967; F (4,37) = 0.320; p = 0.863]. Second, subsequent analyses of covariance (ANCOVAs) that compared the groups on each of the four dependent variables (using the same covariates as did the MANCOVA) revealed no significant differences. For these analyses, a Bonferroni adjustment to alpha maintained the familywise potential for a Type I error at 0.05, producing a critical p value for each ANCOVA of .0125 [i.e., 0.05 = 1-(1-.0125)^4].

 

Table 1. Comparison of the learners' (n = 36) and the native speakers' (n = 7) performance on the four targeted structures. (Scores represent the mean proportion of correct responses on the assessment task.)

Referential Morphology

Temporal Morphology

Intraclausal Syntax

Interclausal Syntax

Learners

0.382

0.595

0.636

0.805

sd = 0.055

sd = 0.042

sd = 0.047

sd = 0.066

Native

0.465

0.558

0.636

0.764

Speakers

sd = 0.126

sd = 0.095

sd = 0.106

sd = 0.075

 

In other words, the learners' performance profile uniformly paralleled that of the baseline native speaker group. Thus, assuming that the native speakers' syntactic abilities were equally developed as their morphological abilities, we must also conclude that the learners possessed syntactic abilities that were equal to their morphological abilities. Consequently, any observed differences between the learners' syntactic and morphological abilities are more likely due to the assessment task's design rather than to the learners' IL abilities.

Interestingly, an examination of Table 1 indicates that the participants performed differently on the four targeted structures. To determine whether any of these differences were significant, the author made all possible pairwise comparisons between the four data sets using t-tests. It is important to note that each data set constituted a combination of the learners' and the native speakers' scores since the performance profiles of the two groups mirrored each other. A Bonferroni adjustment to alpha maintained the familywise potential for a Type I error at 0.05, producing a critical p value for each t-test of .008 [i.e., 0.05 = 1-(1-.008)^6].

 

Table 2. Pairwise t-tests comparing the participants' performance on the targeted structures.

df = 70

Referential Morphology

Temporal Morphology

Intraclausal Syntax

Temporal Morphology

3.08*

Intraclausal Syntax

3.66*

0.81

Interclausal Syntax

6.94*

4.33*

3.13*

* p < 0.008

 

As Table 2 indicates, the only non-significant difference was found in the comparison of the participants' performance on items attempting to measure abilities to decode temporal morphology and intraclausal syntax. That is, in the assessment task, the participants were significantly better at decoding intraclausal syntactic constructs than constructs representing both temporal morphology and intraclausal syntax. And, they were least able to decode referential morphology.

An analysis of the data suggests an affirmative answer to the second research question. The data partially support the processing position, indicating that the only significant predictor of the learners' performance was their abilities to process non-local dependencies in STM. For both the learners and the native speakers, the author examined the correlations between the data sets representing the participants' performance on the four targeted structures.

 

Table 3. Adjusted correlation coefficients comparing the learners' performance on the targeted structures.

Referential Morphology

Temporal Morphology

Intraclausal Syntax

Temporal Morphology

0.041

Intraclausal Syntax

-0.014

0.049

Interclausal Syntax

0.334*

-0.270

-0.057

* p < 0.05

 

Table 4. Adjusted correlation coefficients comparing the native speakers' performance on the targeted structures.

Referential Morphology

Temporal Morphology

Intraclausal Syntax

Temporal Morphology

0.990*

Intraclausal Syntax

0.067

0.090

Interclausal Syntax

0.445

0.470

0.922*

* p < 0.05

 

As Tables 3 and 4 indicate, the native speakers' and the learners' data sets did not exhibit the same types of correlations, suggesting that the two groups employed different psycholinguistic processes to complete the assessment task. The native speakers appeared to employ different strategies in decoding syntax than they did in decoding morphology. The two syntactic factors correlated, as did the two morphological factors; yet, no significant correlations were found across the syntactic and morphological data sets. Thus, these data imply that the native speakers depended on their knowledge of Spanish syntax to complete items testing their abilities to decode intra- and interclausal syntactic constructs; and, they depended on their knowledge of Spanish morphology to complete items relating to referential and temporal morphology. This is not as obvious a relationship to find considering the learners' performance.

The only discernable relationship amongst the learners' data sets was the significant positive correlation between their abilities to decode interclausal syntactic constructs and referential morphology. Of the two syntactic constructs, interclausal syntactic constructs place a greater burden on STM because they entail the processing of linguistic relationships that are much less local than intraclausal syntactic constructs. A similar observation is possible with respect to the morphological data sets. Successfully recovering the referent of a person/number inflection places heavier burdens on STM than does the processing of temporal morphology; the interpretation of referential morphology requires the retrieval of a thematic node in STM whereas temporal morphology does not. Accordingly, it appears that the most important predictor of the learners' performance was their abilities to process non-local dependencies in STM.

 

Discussion and Conclusions

The primary motivation for this study originated in research on the acquisition of the subjunctive by FL learners of Spanish. Investigators such as Collentine (1995) and Pereira (1996) conjecture that subjunctive instruction might be more efficient if it were complemented by curricular efforts to promote learners' abilities to process complex syntax. Yet, little is known about the extent to which, during IL development, verbal morphological abilities exist in a symbiotic relationship with syntactic abilities relating to basic sentence/clause structure. All in all, the SLA literature predicts that, at least in the context of native English speakers learning Spanish, syntactic abilities will generally outpace morphological abilities. Based on the results of the present study, advanced-level FL learners of Spanish (at the third-year level of university instruction) possess verbal morphological abilities that are on par with their abilities to process basic sentential/clausal syntax. Indeed, at least with these grammatical constructs, such learners exhibit native-like behaviors. Even so, students at this level appear to be constrained by memory limitations in ways that native Spanish speakers are not. If one were to characterize the cognitive processes that influenced a native Spanish speaker's performance at any given moment in this experiment, that characterization would be linguistic in nature, as a native speaker's syntactic abilities appeared to operate independently of his or her morphological abilities. Yet, the best predictor of a learner's performance during the experiment was the extent to which s/he could process grammatical phenomena that place processing burdens on STM, be those phenomena syntactic or morphological in nature. In other words, even though advanced-level learners exhibit some native-like morphosyntactic behaviors, their performance is probably constrained by their abilities to process non-local dependencies in working memory and to retrieve information from episodic memory.

It is important to note that there are limitations to the generalizability of this study. First, the author has argued that the targeted structures were elementary for learners at relatively advanced stages of development. Thus, it is unclear whether a study exploring the interaction of more complex syntactic and morphological abilities would produce similar results. Furthermore, it would be productive to examine the relationship between syntactic and morphological abilities in an oral or written production task. Second, to decrease the chance that the experiment's validity might suffer from ceiling effects, the author employed aural passages with vague graphic support and abrupt topic changes in order to decrease the extent to which the participants could predict the grammatical phenomena within a given passage. However, the fact that the native Spanish speakers performed poorly on items involving referential and temporal morphology suggests that, regardless of one's level of proficiency, visual organizers and discursive predictions are integral mechanisms in the processing of (relatively) long aural passages. Clearly, a more valid instrument for the purposes of this study might have observed more accurate performances by the baseline group. An alternative approach might involve targeting structures that are acquired later than those targeted here and employing assessment instruments that contain more natural language samples. Third, the size of the baseline group was small, and it is unclear whether different or more insightful observations would stem from a study involving a more representative sample of native Spanish speakers. Finally, one reviewer of this paper suggested that items testing referential morphology and interclausal syntax may test the same type of linguistic knowledge, since both involve null subjects. This seems untenable. If such were the case, one would expect to find evidence for this position in the performances of both the learners and the baseline group. However, the data found no correlation between the native Spanish speakers' data sets for these two factors. Additionally, if such items were largely testing the same abilities, then one would expect to find that the accuracy with which the participants answered items relating to the two structures should be relatively equal. Yet, such was not the case for either group.

This study is the first in a series of investigations into the relationship between the development of learners' abilities to process syntax and morphology (both in input- and output-oriented tasks). The present study indicates that processing limitations are an important consideration in the design of tasks even for learners at relatively advanced levels of proficiency. Undoubtedly, other important factors will be uncovered as this line of inquiry progresses.

 

Notes

1. Local dependencies refers to the linguistic distance between syntactic constituents and the referents of morphemes. Non-local word order involves syntactic structures that include three or more lexical items, such as a simple, two argument proposition (e.g., María compró chocolate). Non-local morphology entails displaced inflectional dependencies, such as when a subject appears earlier in discourse (e.g., Juan es bajo y, por eso, pensábamos que no estaba presente en la fiesta) or when it is inferable from the situation in which it is uttered.

2. See http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jgc/morphosyntax99.htm for sample materials.

 

References

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