Search

This study investigated how adult second language (L2) speakers of French with near-native proficiency realize verbal negation, a well-known sociolinguistic variable in contemporary spoken French. Data included 10 spontaneous informal conversations between near-native speakers of French and native speakers (NSs) closely acquainted with them. Although some near-native speakers retained ne more frequently than their interlocutors, others produced ne at rates indistinguishable from the NSs. A variationist analysis of 1,877 examples of negation revealed that the near-native speakers had largely acquired the relevant linguistic and sociostylistic factors that condition NS use, although an important subset of the near-native speakers did not vary their ne use according to whether the negation appears in a lexicalized or nonlexicalized phrase. The results contribute to understanding L2 near-nativeness, specifically with respect to sociolinguistic competence in adult learners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports a study that sought to determine whether non-native sentence comprehension can show sensitivity to two different types of Spanish case marking. Sensitivity to case violations was generally more robust with indirect objects in ditransitive constructions than with differential object marking of animate direct objects, even among native speakers of Spanish, which probably reflects linguistic differences in the two types of case. In addition, the overall outcome of two experiments shows that second language (L2) processing can integrate case information, but that, unlike with native processing, attention to a case marker may depend on the presence of a preverbal clitic as an additional cue to the types of postverbal arguments that might occur in a stimulus. Specifically, L2 readers showed no sensitivity to differential object marking with a in the absence of clitics in the first experiment, with stimuli such as Verónica visita al/el presidente todos los meses ‘Veronica visits the[ACC/NOM] president every month’, but the L2 readers in the second experiment showed native-like sensitivity to the same marker when the object it marked was doubled by the clitic lo, as in Verónica lo visita al/el presidente todos los meses. With indirect objects, on the other hand, sensitivity to case markers was native-like in both experiments, although indirect objects were also always doubled by the preverbal clitic le. The apparent first language / second language contrast suggests differences in processing strategy, whereby non-native processing of morphosyntax may rely more on the predictability of forms than does native processing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]