THE EFFECT OF WORD ORDER ON LISTENING COMPREHENSION AND PATTERN RETENTION: AN EXPERIMENT IN SPANISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

Abstract

An important skill which the language learner uses in the listening task is knowledge of the syntax of the target language. This study empirically examines the effect of one aspect of surface structure, word order, on the listening comprehension and pattern retention of native English speakers learning Spanish The factors of sentence length and position of a sentence in a given context are also analyzed As the basis for the experiment, a brief discussion is presented of theoretical implications of word order processing and memory in listening. A comparative analysis of Spanish and English word order patterns follows, which identifies three principal word order patterns of Spanish. subject‐verb‐object, verb‐subject‐object, and object‐verb‐subject Results are reported of the experiment which tested the abilities of native English‐speaking students of Spanish and native Spanish speakers to comprehend an oral passage and remember the word order of certain sentences. The findings indicate that word order significantly affected the degree of comprehension of the English speakers In addition, for both groups of participants, sentences which were both longer and in final position in a context were comprehended most effectively Word order and sentence position significantly affected surface retention of both groups Further, there is indirect evidence to lend additional support to transformational grammar theory indicating that native speakers and foreign language learners may utilize an aural processing strategy of converting patterns to the basic SVO word order Implications of this investigation for Spanish foreign‐language pedagogy as well as suggestions for further research are included.