Abstract
In this work, we investigate the effects of transfer of training in late Brazilian Portuguese-English bilinguals, compared to natives, in relation to their processing of the English causative-have construction. Two experiments were conducted: one focused on the comprehension of the pattern, and the other focused on its production. The results of both experiments point to the fact that the grammatical rule learned by bilinguals is only 'transferred' when there is time to implement it. In the first experiment, we found no effect of training, on the contrary, bilinguals might have been affected by the SVO distribution of the corresponding construction in their L1. In the second experiment, however, we found that bilinguals had high rates of usage of the canonical causative-have form, SAuxOV. This behavior indicates that bilinguals do not implement the rule automatically. Rather, its implementation is seen in more controlled tasks. Thus, explicitly given grammatical rules seem not to be implicitly learned, as they are not automatized to be easily retrieved in real life usage. Moreover, concerning the causative-have rule, bilinguals' linguistic behavior was more similar to that of natives' when they did not implement the rule and used the SVO form with a causative sense.
Highlights
In this work, we investigate the efects of transfer of training in late Brazilian Portuguese-English bilinguals, compared to natives, in relation to their processing of the English causative-have construction
We explore the issue of availability of L2 pedagogical grammar rules representations by examining a situation in which one such rule may not lead to native-like behavior. his is the case of the so-called causativehave construction of English. his construction is formed by the verb have as a light verb, followed by an NP, which is the direct object of the main verb in past participial form that follows it (SAuxOV)
We expected the opposite,1 highly frequent verbs favored the subject-agent interpretation when in SVO sentences, over medium and low frequencies. hat indicates that frequency plays a role in the comprehension of the construction, and that the constructions are in complementary distribution when it comes to their function – more frequent verbs will appear in a transitive form (SVO) when the function is agentive, but in a causative-have (SAuxOV and SVO) when the function is that of provision of services
Summary
We investigate the efects of transfer of training in late Brazilian Portuguese-English bilinguals, compared to natives, in relation to their processing of the English causative-have construction. The extent to which learned pedagogical grammar rules are accessed by L2 users over the course of communicative events remains a subject of contention among second language researchers. Grammatical usage over online L2 processing events may rely mostly on implicit memory representations (Ullman, 2001), or else highly automatized routines of access to linguistic representations, which impose little demands on cognitive resources (Segalowitz, 2010). Such implicit representations and automatized access routines are not necessarily built up exclusively from the type of explicit information provided by pedagogical grammar teaching approaches. As shown by Vilela (2009), several English L2 grammar textbooks suggest that this construction is obligatory for the expression of a beneiciary clausal subject
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