Acquisition of the Spanish plural by French L1 speakers: The role of transfer

This chapter examines an area where there appears to be a typical disassociation between inflection and syntax: the production of Spanish plural morphology and adjective-noun word order by post-puberty French L1 learners. The current debate on the role of functional categories, features, and feature values in the mental representation of L2 learners has given rise to several positions, each of which makes particular predictions about the issue in question here, the acquisition of the Spanish plural. Hawkins and Chan and Hawkins propose the Failed Functional Features Hypothesis (FFH), according to which the interlanguage grammar is restricted to formal features present in the L1; new features cannot be acquired. The syllable is a prosodic unit that organizes segments according to a universal sonority scale around a nucleus, the sonority peak. The chapter shows that transfer at one level can affect other levels of the grammar.