Persistent L1 transfer and limited restructuring

This study investigates the acquisition of subject pronoun distribution in Spanish by Brazilian Portuguese-speaking L2 learners. Specifically, we examine whether L2 learners can successfully reassemble the animacy feature to restrict overt pronouns to animate referents, as required by Spanish grammar. Participants completed elicited production and acceptability tasks in both languages, and their Spanish proficiency was measured using a productive vocabulary test. These findings indicate that while native Spanish speakers demonstrate sensitivity to both animacy and pronoun type, L2 learners distinguish only between null and overt pronouns. Crucially, higher productive lexical knowledge predicts greater sensitivity to pronoun form but fails to trigger feature reassembly for animacy. We interpret these findings as persistent L1 transfer, as learners struggle to restructure the [+animate] feature, even as proficiency increases. Aligning with the Subset-Superset Hypothesis, these results suggest that because the Brazilian Portuguese L1 lacks the animacy restrictions of the Spanish subset grammar, learners encounter no parsing failure or clear negative evidence to trigger restructuring. Consequently, this distribution remains a persistent challenge, rooted in its interface-level nature.