Bilingual acquisition data: Dative Alternation-DA L2 Adult dataset

Abstract

This dataset is the result of the research carried out by Silvia Sánchez Calderón (UNED) and Raquel Fernández Fuertes (UVa) in the frame of the Research Group UVALAL (University of Valladolid Language Acquisition Lab, https://uvalal.uva.es/) whose Principal Investigator is Raquel Fernández Fuertes. In this project, the research is conducted on the second language (L2) acquisition of English Dative Alternation (DA) constructions by adult learners whose first language (L1) is Spanish. The results are compared to a control group of L1 English adults. An Acceptability Judgment Task (AJT) was designed for both groups to address grammaticality, sentence structure and word order of the two English DA structures.

The two DA structures under analysis involve, on the one hand, prepositional to-datives that alternate as Double Object Constructions (DOCs) (1) and, on the other hand, prepositional for-datives that alternate as DOCs (2). The main aim of this project is to explore the role played by the L2 English learners' L1 in their sensitivity towards the two syntactic variants, with a particular emphasis on the potential crosslinguistic influence effects (or lack thereof) from Spanish into English and the Universal Grammar (UG) effect on their acquisition.