El español como L2 en contextos de aprendizaje institucional : la adquisición de los pronombres átonos.

We have analyzed the spontaneous oral production of a group of adolescent and adult native French, English and bilingual students in the initial stages of contact with Spanish as a second language in classroom settings in order to determine what role age, learning context and previous linguistic experience, i.e. the mother tongue or other second languages, have on the acquisition of unstressed pronouns. Moreover, it has been our intention to determine the characteristics of these pronouns (or clitics) in the interlanguage (IL) of our subjects as well as to determine whether there is any difference between the non-native and native use of these pronouns. Specifically, we have analyzed the order of acquisition, the morphology, and the value of the reflexive, experiential, and object pronouns in the IL of our subjects. Our investigations confirm that (1) the subjects acquired some type of native-like system of clitics because native-like clitics were produced from the first interview; (2) as previous investigations have shown, it is the reflexive and experiential pronouns that are acquired first; (3) the subjects appear to value the clitics as affixes and not as nouns; (4) the differences between adolescent and adult acquisition cannot be clearly established; neither can (5) the correlation between the first and or other second language(s) and the acquisition of Spanish be determined at these initial stages. Further investigations at more advanced states of acquisition are required