| One goal of researchers focusing on morphosyntax in second language acquisition (SLA) has been to account for the difficulty involved in acquiring Spanish object-verb (OV) clitic structures. The principal aim of the present study was to find out whether the acquisition of transitive OV clitic structures would facilitate the acquisition of gustar structures and vice versa. Instead of the notion of 'markedness', which has been used in the literature to explain how exposure to one linguistic item or structure may facilitate the acquisition of another (e.g., Gass, 1982), the present study uses the Competition Model as its foundation (Bates & MacWhinney, 1989). As learning Spanish OV clitic and gustar-type verbs for native speakers of English involve the resetting of cue weights for word order and verbal morphology, it was predicted that the acquisition of one 'late-acquired' structure would facilitate the acquisition of the other. The study also compares the differential effects of exposure versus practice on second language development.;Paper-and-pencil tasks designed for the study were administered to ten intact classes of introductory Spanish randomly assigned to one of the four experimental conditions resulting from combining exposure versus practice and the two structures. A control group (assessment tests only) was also added. Pre/post/delayed recognition (R), interpretation (I), and production (P) tests assessed the potential effects of the independent variables and their interaction.;All experimental groups made significant gains in their own structure, with the exception of the direct object [-practice] group, who made gains only in interpretation. The facilitative effects of the acquisition of one structure on the other were statistically significant in production, therefore confirming that a change in the weights assigned to cues necessary to correctly process a structure extends to other structures that rely on the same cues for processing, as is the case of OV and gustar-type structures. |
