Espírito Santo, AnaAlexandre, NéliaPerpiñán, Sílvia2023-07-122023-07-122024Espírito Santo A, Alexandre N, Perpiñán S. The role of resumption in the acquisition of European Portuguese prepositional relative clauses by Chinese learners. Second Lang Res. 2024;40(1):103-38. DOI: 10.1177/026765832211377150267-6583http://hdl.handle.net/10230/57549This article reports on an experimental study on the acquisition of prepositional relative clauses in second language European Portuguese by Chinese native speakers. It focuses on the role of resumption, mandatory in prepositional relative clauses in Chinese (the native language of the learners) and non-conventional in European Portuguese (the target language). Results of an oral production task and two online acceptability judgment tasks indicated that resumption does not transfer from the native language, and that Chinese learners of European Portuguese employ movement structures to produce and process relative clauses. Additionally, results showed that resumptive pronouns do not rescue or ameliorate ungrammatical extractions from islands, contrary to what is traditionally assumed in grammatical theory. This finding was kept constant across participants, native and non-native. Overall, we conclude that second language speakers are able to select and reassemble movement features in their non-native language and use similar processing mechanisms as native speakers to analyse island configurations.application/pdfeng© The Author(s) 2023. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).The role of resumption in the acquisition of European Portuguese prepositional relative clauses by Chinese learnersinfo:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1177/02676583221137715null-preppied-pipingprepositional relative clausesresumptive pronounssyntactic islandsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess