Sensitivity to the Path Conflation in Oral L2 Spanish

Abstract

This chapter presents the oral production task. The participants from the receptive task watched silent film clips of a cartoon and retold the stories in L1 English and L2 Spanish to native-speaker interviewers of both languages. Findings were compared with those of the same L1 Spanish control group and submitted to language-group and corpus-based analysis. The two methodologies indicated different trends for the composition of the vocabulary of motion verbs in L2 Spanish and L1 Spanish. While the language-group analysis presented higher percentages of path types than manner across the four groups, the corpus-based analysis revealed that the percentages of path decreased proportionally with the levels of proficiency in L2 Spanish. The L1 Spanish manner types corroborated a similar trend. The preliminary evidence from the corpus-based analysis identifies low-frequency manner (not path) mapped onto verb predicates as an indicator of lexical sophistication in the Spanish vocabulary. This suggests that in connected speech, the expression of motion in Spanish may not rely entirely on high frequencies of path, but rather on a vocabulary that is rich in manner verb types. What this means is that for adult Anglophone learners to acquire mastery of the expression of motion in L2 Spanish, uttering high frequencies of path tokens would only partly enable them to sound idiomatically attuned. The evidence collected in the oral production task seems to indicate that learners need to lexicalize manner verb types while also producing connected speech with multiple repetitions of path tokens.