A grammaticality judgement test for the past hypothetical/ counterfactual conditional in English

Abstract

Second language learning has been the focus of much debate over the last decades. On the one hand, parameter research has been crucial to answer the question of how exactly the learning device used by children is still available to L2 learning. On the other hand, according to Schmidt's Noticing Hypothesis, output facilitates the noticing of problems in the IL and the relevant features in the input. In this paper we carry out a research on conditionals among Spanish students at the University of Las Palmas. Our purpose is to investigate whether there is evidence of L1 transfer in the students' interlanguage production of the past hypothetical counterfactual and mixed-time-reference-counterfactual conditionals, and to know whether output supported by negative feedback can enhance acquisition of the target forms.