Abstract
This study investigates whether and to what extent native Russian-speaking and Dutch-speaking second-language learners of German can acquire lexical and distributional constraints on permissible structural variation in infinitival complementation. The results from an elicited written production task and a scalar acceptability judgement task showed that, in both experiments, the two non-native speaker groups behaved differently both from German native speakers and from each other. We attribute the observed group differences to the influence of first language (L1) word-order constraints on second language (L2) infinitival linearization preferences. Our findings support the hypothesis that structural surface-level overlap between the L1 and L2 facilitates cross-linguistic influence on L2 word-order choices and judgements. We also observed task effects indicating that L1 performance profiles can be approached more closely in L2 production than in metalinguistic judgements, which shows that L1 constraints do not necessarily affect all language modalities to the same extent.
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