Experimental study demonstrates directional effects in null subject comprehension among Portuguese and Spanish learners, indicating markedness shapes cross-linguistic acquisition.
I revisit some ‘old’ issues in Second Language Acquisition concerning Markedness and the Subset Principle (Berwick 1985; Wexler and Manzini 1987) in a parametric hierarchy approach (Roberts 2019) to analyze null subjects in Spanish/BP grammars. The hypothesis is that markedness explains directionality effects of learning both in terms of time and cross-linguistic influence. Based on the results of an experimental study on the comprehension of 3Sg NSs by PortugueseL1-SpanishL2 and SpanishL1-PortugueseL2 learners living in Argentina and Brazil, I present some empirical evidence in favor of Almeida’s (2022) predictions drawn up from Ruas’ (2020) ideas. This work is expected to contribute to the field of language acquisition by opening new research problems on understudied language pairs.
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Samara Almeida (2026) studied this question.
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