Exclusively reflexive verbs in Spanish: a study of its acquisition among English speaking students at university level

The aim of this paper is to analyze whether the syntactic and semantic behavior of the so called quasi-reflexive or mandatory reflexive verbs in Spanish such as enterarse, quejarse, burlarse, acordarse, fijarse or jactarse can be learned and assimilated in a native-like manner by English native speakers who have reached an advance or an intermediate level of Spanish. The experiment carried out consisted of a grammaticality judgment task with six quasi-reflexive verbs forms and eighteen fillers. Three different groups of participants performed the task: a control group of native speakers of Spanish, a graduate student group with a high level of Spanish and an undergraduate student group with an intermediate level of Spanish. The data gathered and their statistical analyses seem to prove that there is a significant difference in the way native and non native speakers of Spanish judge grammatical and agrammatical quasi-reflexive verbs constructions in Spanish.