VIIIth International Conference of Language Acquisition

On September 7th at the VIIIth International Conference of Language Acquisition held in Mallorca, Spain, Dr. Tiffany Judy presented her study The Syntax and Semantics of Adjective Distribution in Spanish-Polish Speakers. 

Dr. Judy’s abstract:

“This study examines potential age and microparametric effects in childhood bilinguals (currently adults) in an understudied language group, Polish-Spanish speakers. Specifically, a Spanish group (N=28) and a Later (N=23) and an Earlier (N=8) heritage speaker group living in Misiones, Argentina completed 3 experimental tasks assessing their knowledge of the syntactic and syntax-semantic distribution of adjectives. Results show that, despite several semantic differences related to adjective position, both experimental groups demonstrate knowledge of interpretive constraints that fall out from underlying Spanish syntax. Differences predicted as a result of crosslinguistic influence were not evidenced, yet, contrary to Polish and Spanish, the experimental groups accepted ungrammatical postnominal intensional adjectives significantly more than Spanish speakers. Results contribute to research examining DP word order in Romance, which has largely focused on Germanic-Romance pairings.”