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The Opc In Spanish And Polish Monolingual Speakers, Ewelina Barski

Ewelina Barski, PhD

A variety of studies have documented the acquisition of the Overt Pronoun Constraint (OPC) (Montalbetti, 1984) in second language speakers (Kanno 1997, Pérez-Leroux & Glass 1999, Rothman & Iverson, 2007) but none have looked at the OPC from an experimental perspective. This paper takes an experimental approach to the OPC focusing on the mental representation of the OPC in Spanish and Polish monolinguals going beyond L2 speakers and probing into the interpretations that monolinguals assign to pronouns (null and overt) with quantified and referential antecedents. Specifically, I aim to investigate whether there is a difference in how monolinguals treat different …