The acquisition of Spanish as L3 by Chinese students: constructions with gustar

The use of the Spanish psychological verb gustar has a notable difference in the morphosyntax-semantic interface compared to that of the corresponding ones in Chinese and English. In this paper, Chinese students of different degrees are selected in a Chinese university, who acquire Spanish as L3. The investigator examines how they perform the translations from Chinese to Spanish. The results reveal that the most difficult grammatical category to be acquired by the Chinese native subjects; both L1 and L2 influence on all the items analyzed, but to different degrees. It is discovered that the thematic hierarchy and the transfer of L1 or L2 are the main reasons for the development of interlanguage representation. The low processing accuracy regarding the interface information is possibly due to the weak ability to extract and integrate them and the difficulty of the task.