Acquisition of deictic movement verbs by Czech learners of Spanish as a foreign language

Rosalía Calle Bocanegra

Abstract:

This paper aims to examine the extent to which Czech learners of Spanish
as a foreign language acquire the Thinking for Speaking (TFS) patterns (Slobin 1996)
with respect to deictic verbs of movement. Prior research (Gathercole 1977; IbarretxeAntuñano et al. 2014) has shown that movement verbs are not necessarily
semantically equivalent in different languages, and this is likely to lead to crosslanguage interference. The correctness of Spanish deictic verb use in different
conditions was assessed using a grammaticality judgement task and a cloze task for
40 Czech learners of Spanish and 13 native speakers. As expected, the native speakers
outperformed the learners in both tasks, especially in conditions where Spanish and
Czech mismatch. Importantly, the learners’ performance tended to improve with
increasing foreign language proficiency, suggesting the gradual acquisition of target
language TFS patterns. The study represents a baseline investigation of Czech
learners’ difficulties and forms part of a larger project that aims to devise efficient
methods of teaching deixis in a foreign language.