L2 Learnersâ Difficulties in the Interpretation of the Spanish Subjunctive: L1 Influence and Misanalysis of the Input
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study examines L2 learners’ difficulties in the acquisition of the Spanish subjunctive. In particular, it investigates the interpretations English-speaking L2 learners of Spanish assign to the subjunctive in temporal, concessive, and conditional clauses, where mood choice involves the interaction of morpho-syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic knowledge. In contrast to previous research that has given little attention to the difficulties L2 learners experience, this study hypothesizes they might be attributed to “input traps” resulting from L1 transfer of syntactic and semantic properties of the subjunctive adjuncts and misanalysis of the input due to the lack of integration of different types of information. This study tests this claim by comparing the grammars of English-speaking L2 learners of Spanish with those of native Spanish speakers. If L2 learners share similar patterns with L1 speakers in contexts where both languages behave similarly, and exhibit different patterns from L1 speakers in contexts where both languages behave differently, difficulties should be attributed to L1 influence on the L2. On the other hand, if L2 learners exhibit different patterns from L1 speakers in contexts where semantic or pragmatic features determine the use of the subjunctive, difficulties should be attributed to failures in form-meaning mappings. Data collection involved a Preference Task with three possible options: a sentence with the indicative, with the subjunctive, or no preference. Subjects were asked to select which of the three choices they preferred according to the context presented in the story. Twenty advanced English-speaking L2 learners of Spanish and twenty native speakers from different Spanish-speaking countries, who served as the control group, took part in this study. Results indicate that subjunctive adjuncts present difficulties in L2 acquisition even for advanced L2 learners. Although they exhibit sensitivity to certain subjunctive features and contextual meanings, data reveal that convergence and non-convergence were primarily determined by L1 influence on L2. Crucially, those features absent from the L1 give rise to greater efforts and difficulties in L2 form-meaning mappings of mood selection.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".