Modelo de Competencia Unificado para el aprendizaje de lenguas: una propuesta de investigación sobre la comprensión de la construcción resultativa del inglés

Abstract

This paper describes a functionalist model of incremental and interactive processing of sentence comprehension, namely, the Competition Model (MacWhinney & Bates, 1989), and the subsequent development of the Unified Competition Model for bilingual processing (MacWhinney, 2005). The general objective is to explore the analytical categories of this program for the formulation of an experimental proposal on the comprehension of the English Resultative Construction by Spanish native speakers who learn English as a Foreign Language. Through literature review, this paper is particularly concerned with: i) describing the model's analytical categories such as cue validity, cue cost, cue strength, form-function coalitions, etc.; ii) identifying the model's treatment of L2 proficiency differences in sentence comprehension in bilinguals; and iii) identifying the treatment of L1-to-L2 transfer effects. The model predicts that the higher the proficiency in L2, the greater the degree of superposition of both languages,  less dependency on the L1 (less transfer), and greater automatization of the target language, which would allow for the development of a new way of thinking in another language.