L2 Sentence Processing of Spanish OVSWord Order and Direct Object Pronouns: An Analysis of ContextualConstraints

Native speakers of English acquiring Spanish as a second language (L2) rely on word order to assign the grammatical roles of subject and object to words in a sentence (Houston, 1997; Lee, 1987; 2000; LoCoco, 1987; VanPatten, 1984; VanPatten and Houston, 1998). The psycholinguistic strategy causes L2 learners to assign the roles of subject or agent to the first noun encountered in a target sentence. Doing so yields non-nativelike interpretations of object-verb-subject (OVS) sentences, on the one hand, and delays the acquisition of object pronouns, on the other, because of the variable word order characteristic of Spanish. For example, both of the following Spanish sentences are grammatical: