The effects of typological proximity between Portuguese and Spanish on the use of derived words in PFL
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.30827/portalin.vi46.37070Keywords:
Bilingual lexicon;, foreign language acquisition, morphology;, word formationAbstract
In this paper, we present the results of a study on the effects of typological proximity between Portuguese and Spanish on the use of derived words (DW) by learners of Portuguese as a foreign language (PFL) at different stages of their (inter)linguistic development. Based on a comparative study of the lexicogenetic constructions used in a corpus of texts written by PFL learners in immersion and their Spanish counterparts, we assess the extent of the coincidence of word construction patterns and morpholexical constituents (bases and affixes) in the two languages, in order to gauge how this knowledge influences the production of derived words at different levels of proficiency (from A1 to C1). According to the data collected, learners who have Spanish as their L1 accurately instantiate (85.7% on average) the construction patterns of Portuguese, in line with the high degree of coincidence of the patterns and affixes used in these two languages. The deviations, in addition to being insignificant, mainly concern the graphic representation of lexical bases.
Downloads
References
Booij, G. (2010). Morphological analysis. In B. Heine & H. Narrog (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of grammatical analysis (pp. 507–529). Oxford University Press.
Booij, G. (2016). Construction morphology. In A. Hippisley & G. Stump (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of morphology (pp. 424–448). Cambridge University Press.
Brenders, P., van Hell, J., & Dijkstra, T. (2011). Word recognition in child second language learners: Evidence from cognates and false friends. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 109(4), 383–396. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2011.03.012
Brysbaert, M., Mandera, P., & Keuleers, E. (2018). The word frequency effect in word processing: A review update. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 27(1), 45–50.
Brysbaert, M., van Dyck, G., & van de Poel, M. (1999). Visual word recognition in bilinguals: Evidence from masked phonological priming. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 25(1), 137–148.
Bybee, J. (1998). The emergent lexicon. In Proceedings of the 34th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society: The Panels (pp. 421–435). Chicago Linguistic Society.
Carrasco‐Ortiz, H., Midgley, K. J., & Frenck‐Mestre, C. (2012). Are phonological representations in bilinguals language specific? An ERP study on interlingual homophones. Psychophysiology, 49(4), 531–543. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-8986.2011.01333.x
Chuang, Y. Y., Bell, M. J., Banke, I., & Baayen, R. H. (2020). Bilingual and multilingual mental lexicon: A modeling study with linear discriminative learning. Language Learning, 71, 219–292.
Clahsen, H., & Neubauer, K. (2010). Morphology, frequency, and the processing of derived words in native and non-native speakers. Lingua, 120, 2627–2637.
Comesaña, M., Ferré, P., Romero, J., Guasch, M., Soares, A. P., & García-Chico, T. (2015). Facilitative effect of cognate words vanishes when reducing the orthographic overlap: The role of stimuli list composition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 41(3), 614–635. https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000065
Comesaña, M., Soares, A., Sanchez-Casas, R., & Lima, C. (2012). Lexical and semantic representations in the acquisition of L2 cognate and non-cognate words: Evidence from two learning methods in children. British Journal of Psychology, 103(3), 378–392. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8295.2011.02080.x
Conselho da Europa. (2001). Quadro Europeu Comum de Referência para as Línguas. Edições ASA. https://www.dge.mec.pt/sites/default/files/Basico/Documentos/quadro_europeu_comum_referencia.pdf
Corder, P. (1967). The significance of learners’ errors. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 5, 161–170.
De Groot, A., & Keijzer, R. (2000). What is hard to learn is easy to forget: The roles of word concreteness, cognate status, and word frequency in foreign-language vocabulary learning and forgetting. Language Learning, 50(1), 1–56. https://doi.org/10.1111/0023-8333.00110
Diependaele, K., Duñabeitia, J. A., Morris, J., & Keuleers, E. (2011). Fast morphological effects in first and second language word recognition. Journal of Memory and Language, 64, 344–358.
Dijkstra, T., & van Heuven, W. J. B. (1998). The BIA model and bilingual word recognition. In J. Grainger & A. M. Jacobs (Eds.), Localist connectionist approaches to human cognition (pp. 189–225). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Dijkstra, T., & van Heuven, W. J. B. (2002). The architecture of the bilingual word recognition system: From identification to decision. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 5(3), 175–197. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728902003012
Dijkstra, T., Grainger, J., & van Heuven, W. J. (1999). Recognition of cognates and interlingual homographs: The neglected role of phonology. Journal of Memory and Language, 41(4), 496–518. https://doi.org/10.1006/jmla.1999.2654
Dijkstra, T., Miwa, K., Brummelhuis, B., Sappelli, M., & Baayen, H. (2010). How cross-language similarity and task demands affect cognate recognition. Journal of Memory and Language, 62(3), 284–301. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2009.12.003
Dijkstra, T., van Jaarsveld, H., & Brinke, S. T. (1998). Interlingual homograph recognition: Effects of task demands and language intermixing. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1(1), 51–66. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728998000121
Ellis, R. (2000). The study of second language acquisition. Oxford University Press.
Fernandes, A. I., Luna, K., Soares, A. P., & Comesaña, M. (2023). Is there an early morphological decomposition during L2 lexical access? A meta-analysis on the morphological priming effect. Brain Sciences, 13, 127. https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci13010127
Gass, S., & Selinker, L. (Eds.). (1993). Language transfer in language learning (Rev. ed.). John Benjamins.
Grainger, J., & Beauvillain, C. (1987). Language blocking and lexical access in bilinguals. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 39(2), 295–319. https://doi.org/10.1080/14640748708401788
Grainger, J., Midgley, K., & Holcomb, P. J. (2010). Re-thinking the bilingual interactive-activation model from a developmental perspective (BIA-d). Language Acquisition Across Linguistic and Cognitive Systems, 52, 267–283.
Heyer, V., & Clahsen, H. (2015). Late bilinguals see a scan in scanner and in scandal: Dissecting formal overlap from morphological priming in the processing of derived words. Bilingualism, 18, 543–550.
Ilari, R. (2013). O português no contexto das línguas românicas. In E. P. Raposo et al. (Orgs.), Gramática do português (Vol. 1, pp. 49–66). Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian.
Jackendoff, R., & Audring, J. (2016). Morphological schemas: Theoretical and psycholinguistic issues. The Mental Lexicon, 11(3), 467–493.
Jackendoff, R., & Audring, J. (2018). Relational morphology in the parallel architecture. In J. Audring & F. Masini (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of morphological theory (pp. 390–408). Oxford University Press.
Jackendoff, R., & Audring, J. (2020). The texture of the lexicon. Oxford University Press.
Kroll, J., & Stewart, E. (1994). Category interference in translation and picture naming: Evidence for asymmetric connections between bilingual memory representations. Journal of Memory and Language, 33(2), 149–174.
Kuperman, V., Bertram, R., & Baayen, R. H. (2010). Processing trade-offs in the reading of Dutch derived words. Journal of Memory and Language, 62, 83–97.
Liceras, J. M., & Alba de la Fuente, A. (2015). Typological proximity in L2 acquisition: The Spanish non-native grammar of French speakers. In T. Judy & S. Perpiñán (Eds.), The acquisition of Spanish in understudied language pairings (pp. 329–358). John Benjamins.
Lõo, K., Toth, A., Karaca, F., & Järvikivi, J. (2020). Morphological processing is gradient, not discrete, in L1 and L2 English masked priming. The Mental Lexicon, 17, 76–103.
Martinet, A. (1979). Preface. In U. Weinreich (Ed.), Languages in contact: Findings and problems (9th ed., pp. vii–ix). Mouton.
Martins, C., Ferreira, T., Sitoe, M., Abrantes, C., Janssen, M., Fernandes, A., Silva, A., Lopes, I., Pereira, I., & Santos, J. (2019). Corpus de produções escritas de aprendentes de PL2 (PEAPL2): Subcorpus Português Língua Estrangeira. Coimbra: CELGA-ILTEC. https://teitok2.iltec.pt/peapl2-ple/index.php?action=home
Mulder, K., Dijkstra, T., & Baayen, R. H. (2015). Cross-language activation of morphological relatives in cognates: The role of orthographic overlap and task-related processing. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9(16).
Pavón Lucero, M. V. (1999). Índice de voces. In I. Bosque & V. Demonte (Dirs.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española (Vol. 3, pp. 5177–5268). Espasa.
Pereira, R. (2024). Produções neológicas em Português Língua Não Materna. Annali – Sezione Romanza, LXVI(1), 97–111. https://doi.org/10.6093/547-2121/11052
Pereira, R., & Ferreira, T. (en prensa). Lexical creativity and interference in written texts of Spanish learners of Portuguese. In F. Valetopoulos (Ed.), Analyse contrastive et didactique des langues étrangères / Contrastive analysis and foreign languages teaching. Peter Lang.
Real Academia Española. (2025). Diccionario de la lengua española (23.ª ed., versión 23.8 en línea). https://dle.rae.es
Reifegerste, J., Elin, K., & Clahsen, H. (2019). Persistent differences between native speakers and late bilinguals: Evidence from inflectional and derivational processing in older speakers. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 22, 425–440.
Ringbom, H. (2007). Cross-linguistic similarity in foreign language learning. Multilingual Matters.
Ringbom, H. (2013). Linguistic transfer. In P. Robinson (Ed.), The Routledge encyclopedia of second language acquisition (pp. 396–400). Routledge.
Rio-Torto, G. et al. (2016). Gramática derivacional do português (2.ª ed.). Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra.
Rodrigues, A. S. (2016). O léxico mental como uma rede ou arquitetura de redes. Philologie im Netz, Beiheft, 11, 36–53.
Schachter, J. (1996). Maturation and the issue of Universal Grammar. In W. C. Ritchie & T. K. Bhatia (Eds.), Handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 159–194). Academic Press.
Selinker, L. (1972). Interlanguage. International Review of Applied Linguistics, 10, 209–231.
Ullman, M. T., & Lovelett, J. T. (2018). Implications of the declarative/procedural model for improving second language learning: The role of memory enhancement techniques. Second Language Research, 14(1), 39–65.
Van Assche, E., Brysbaert, M., & Duyck, W. (2020). Bilingual lexical access. In R. R. Heredia & A. B. Cieslicka (Eds.), Bilingual lexical ambiguity resolution (pp. 42–67). Cambridge University Press.
Van Hell, J., & Tanner, D. (2012). Second language proficiency and cross‐language lexical activation. Language Learning, 62, 148–171.
Varela Ortega, S. (2005). Morfología léxica: La formación de palabras. Gredos.
Voga, M., Gardani, F., & Giraudo, H. (2020). Multilingualism and the mental lexicon: Insights from language processing, diachrony, and language contact. In V. Pirrelli, I. Plag, & W. Dressler (Eds.), Word knowledge and word usage: A cross-disciplinary guide to the mental lexicon (pp. 506–552). De Gruyter.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Tânia Santos Ferreira, Rui Pereira (Autor/a)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
