Subject-Verb Agreement Errors in English L2 and Spanish L3 of L1 Norwegian Learners
Master thesis
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https://hdl.handle.net/11250/3138643Utgivelsesdato
2024Metadata
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Sammendrag
Grammar is an important part of the process of language acquisition, and this thesisinvestigates the hypothesis regarding subject-verb agreement being the bottleneck ofsecond language acquisition. My study is conducted on the data provided by theresearch group TRAWL, comprised by 19 participants who have handed in texts in bothL2 English and L3 Spanish during their years of English and Spanish instruction enrolledin either lower- or upper secondary schools around Norway. Afterward, I handpickedthe data from TRAWL necessary for my sub corpus and investigation. From there, Ianalyzed the data manually, and then I discussed the results.The goal with my thesis was to investigate whether or not subject-verbagreement was indeed the bottleneck in L2 acquisition, as there are studies who havelooked at morphosyntax in different aspects, which led me to assume that I would findmany S-V agreement errors produced by L1 Norwegian learners in both the L2 Englishand the L3 Spanish.My results show that L1 Norwegian learners of L2 English and L3 Spanish inNorwegian lower- and upper secondary schools do produce SVA agreement errors in therespective languages. However, the results do not confirm the theory that subject-verbagreement is the bottleneck of L2 acquisition. However, the results indicate that withinSVA, pupils make the most omission errors in L2 English production. In Spanishhowever, the results show that 40% of the errors are due to overgeneralization errors,where the pupils use plural subject, but fail to inflect the verb according to the subject.