Sustained interaction between a bilingual's two languages can be a first step toward diachronic language change. We describe two investigations that explore this by examining how bilinguals process innovative syntactic structures in their first language. In the first investigation, a sentence recall/sentence matching task, bilinguals and monolinguals exhibited differences in their tolerance of expressions of induced motion, which vary in acceptability between the two languages (Portuguese and English). In the second investigation, a priming methodology was employed to induce bilinguals to produce in their first language (Spanish) innovative constructions modeled on the second language (English), using materials where the alternation is shared between the two languages (voice, reciprocal) or not (dative). The two investigations provide a window into how languages interact in bilinguals, inducing tolerance of ungrammaticality which, we will argue, could lead to long-term novel representations in the linguistic competence repositories.

Este artigo propõe que um dos desafios encontrados por aprendizes de línguas, engajados com projetos de telecolaboração mediada pelo computador, diz respeito ao manejo das divergências entre seus próprios contextos de aprendizagem e os de seus colaboradores. Esse argumento será ilustrado por meio do relato de uma experiência de aprendizagem de português-inglês desenvolvida segundo os parâmetros de uma pedagogia da aprendizagem de línguas, mediada pelo computador denominada "aprendizagem em tandem". Na análise, será proposto que diferenças macrossociais entre o ensino de língua portuguesa na Austrália e o ensino de inglês no Brasil tenham sido insidiosas nos resultados do trabalho de telecolaboração.

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The present study investigates the acquisition of the English double object constructions (GOLDBERG, 1995) by Brazilian learners. We hypothesize that, due to first language (L1) influences, the prepositional ditransitive construction (John gave a book to Mary) will be acquired earlier, while the ditransitive construction (John gave Mary a book) will be part of the learner's interlanguages (SELINKER, 1972) only at the advanced level of proficiency. We also hypothesize that learners may transfer (ODLIN, 1989) the placement of the object pronoun in pre-verbal position from their L1 to their interlanguage in early stages of acquisition (João me deu um livro / *John me gave a book). We test our hypotheses by comparing the performance of three groups of learners (beginning, intermediate, and advanced) and native speakers of English on an acceptability judgment task used as a measure of learnability and generalization. Results confirm the order of acquisition of the English double object constructions predicted for native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese. Moreover, results suggest that, although mother tongue influences may have taken place, they do not do so pervasively, but rather selectively, corroborating the proposal by Kellerman (1983).• KEYWORD: Cross-linguistic influence. Selective transfer. Double object constructions.Bilingualism. introductionThe linguistic realizations of predicators -especially as expressed by verbs -and the arguments that accompany them to saturate a semantic configuration are taken as a central element of knowledge of language in several theoretical frameworks, such as Chomsky (