BOOK OF ABSTRACTS - EUROSLA

using a separate acceptability judgment test, we divided our learners into
those who allow and those who do not allow resumptive pronouns in their
native Spanish. Next, we looked at their acceptance of grammatical and
ungrammatical long-distance English wh-movement sentences without and
with resumptives (examples below).
Our results indicate that both groups of advanced learners, those that do
and those that don’t have resumptives in their individual grammars, have
acquired the ungrammaticality of resumptives in English (Figure 1) and are
indistinguishable from native speakers. Thus our findings do not support
T&D’s conclusion that uninterpretable features remain a problem in L2A
even at advanced levels of proficiency. Furthermore, all of the factors that
T&D propose would play a role in the acquisition of wh-movement, namely
animacy, d-linking, subject/object wh, that versus that-less embedded clause,
had no effect on our advanced learners’ performance.
Figure 1: Acceptance rates of grammatical and ungrammatical stimuli
Alexopoulou, T. & F. Keller, 2002. Resumption and locality: A crosslinguistic
experimental study. In Papers from the 38th Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic
Society, volume 1: The Main Session (pp. 1-14). Chicago.
Tsimpli, I. M. & Dimitrakopoulou, M. (2007). The Interpretability Hypothesis:
Evidence from wh-interrogatives in second language acquisition. Second
Language Research, 23, 215-242.
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