Resumen de Acquisition of deictic movement verbs by Czech learners of Spanish as a foreign language

Rosalía Calle Bocanegra

• This paper aims to examine the extent to which Czech learners of Spanish as a foreign language acquirethe Thinking for Speaking (TFS) patterns (Slobin 1996) with respect to deictic verbs of movement. Prior research (Gathercole 1977; Ibarretxe-Antuñano et al. 2014) has shown that movement verbs are not necessarily semantically equivalent in different languages, and this is likely to lead to cross-language interference. The correctness of Spanish deictic verb use in different conditions was assessed using a grammaticality judgement task and a cloze task for 40 Czech learners of Spanish and 13 native speakers. As expected, the native speakers outperformed the learners in both tasks, especially in conditions where Spanish and Czech mismatch. Importantly, the learners' performance tended to improve with increasing foreign language proficiency, suggesting the gradual acquisition of target language TFS patterns. The study represents a baseline investigation of Czech learners' difficulties and forms part of a larger project that aims to devise efficient methods of teaching deixis in a foreign language.