Early use of null and overt subjects in L2 Spanish: Evidence from two oral tasks

Recent research has shown that advanced English learners of Spanish can
successfully acquire the syntactic, pragmatic and referential properties of null and overt
subjects. However, acquiring these structures is problematic at beginner and at
intermediate stages of acquisition for these learners. In this study, we investigate the
emergence and development of null and overt subjects by 60 English learners of
Spanish (20 beginners, 20 intermediate and 20 advanced) in order to understand
why these forms are initially difficult to acquire. The oral data for this study were
collected using a paired-discussion task and a story retell and are freely available
from the SPLLOC project (www.splloc.soton.ac.uk). We argue that the cline of
difficulty suggested by Cho & Slabakova (2014), based on whether L1-L2 form-meaning
mismatches require reassembly and whether a dedicated morpheme is available,
makes appropriate predictions for these structures. We also argue that the type of
task used to elicit the oral data and the overall linguistic and narrative abilities of
the learners are also likely to influence the rate of use of these forms.