Language Attrition and Ultimate Attainment

Firstly, we seek to demonstrate across different linguistic tasks whether very advanced adult late bilingual speakers can successfully acquire new linguistic features. To achieve this goal, we focus on three understudied linguistic phenomena: the L2 Spanish acquisition of (i) adjective ordering restrictions, (ii) accusative objects (including their interpretations and the subjacency constraints underlying their grammatical representation), and (iii) clitic se.

Secondly, we wish to determine whether our data are consistent with the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere 2009) and provide counterevidence to Interpretability and Interface approaches (see Sorace 2011, 2012), which claim that interpretable features relevant to the syntax-semantics interface are challenging to acquire and more vulnerable to language loss.

Our third goal is to understand whether there is evidence of attrition effects regarding the linguistic phenomena under study in the participants L1. The target populations are near-native speakers of Spanish with L1 EP (Romance language), German and English (both non-Romance languages) living in an immersed language context in Majorca, Spain. The analyses will be conducted on the basis of empirical evidence from three datasets collected during the initial steps of the project on near-native migrant bilingual speakers and on Spanish-Catalan bilingual speakers used as a control group besides L1 English, L1 German, and L1 EP monolingual control groups. Experimental tasks will include both production and comprehension data and we will count with both offline and online processing methodologies.