Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grants: Continuity Hypotheses Revisited: English L2 Acquisition of Bulgarian Nominal Domain

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With NSF support and under the direction of Stanley Dubinsky and Hyeson Park. Ms. Mila Tasseva-Kurktchieva will investigate the second language (L2) acquisition of the Bulgarian noun phrase by adult native speakers of English. The goals of this research are: (i) to test a new variant of the dynamic approach to the L2 acquisition of Bulgarian nominal structure, including the timing and order of acquisition of gender and number agreement, possessives, and definite determiners. The study will use a unique pool of subjects-US Peace Corps volunteers exposed to the target language through both immersion and classroom instruction. This research will be among a few studies to focus on the very early stages of L2 acquisition-three to four weeks after subjects' first exposure to the target language. Subjects will be tested before and after exposure to (somewhat) formal grammar instruction in the classroom. Thus, the study will utilize both naturally occurring data and data from a controlled classroom environmentThis study promises several important results: (i) it adds to our knowledge of the cognitive processes involved in the L2 acquisition of the grammatical structure; (ii) it will contribute to our understanding of the acquisition and syntactic structure of Slavic languages; (iii) where most L2 acquisition studies are concerned with the grammatical properties gender and number, definiteness, or possessives in isolation, this research will consider the acquisition of these properties in relations to one another; and (iv) it will inform foreign language teaching practices and help to answer long-standing questions regarding the role of input type (instructed versus natural) in L2 acquisition.