In sociolinguistic contexts where standardized languages coexist with regional dialects, the study of differential item functioning is a valuable tool for examining certain linguistic uses or varieties as threats to score validity. From an ecological perspective, this paper describes three stages in the study of differential item functioning…

The General Education Law was approved half a century ago. It was designed by Francoism to reform the educational system, adjusting itself to the liberal-developmental approach that Franco's regime followed in its last few decades. The oppression that the so-called "vernacular languages" were subject to during the former years of…

The current study investigates Spanish children's variation between the standard and non-standard forms for second person singular preterit --s ("caiste" [approximately equal to] "caístes"). All second person singular preterit forms were extracted from the spontaneous speech of 78 children in Spain and analyzed for the effects…

Literature on early language acquisition has observed that age of onset of acquisition (AoA) is relevant for certain grammatical phenomena. Simultaneous bilinguals receive regular and extensive exposure to two languages from birth (Müller, 2009), whereas sequential child learners get in extensive contact to L[subscript B] once the L[subscript A]…

This study examines the role of language proficiency and other individual factors (attitudes, input) in the acquisition of language-specific [ð] and dialect-specific [Ø] allophones of Spanish intervocalic /d/ in the /ado/ context by L2 and heritage Spanish speakers during a short-term study abroad in Sevilla, Spain. Twenty L2-intermediate, 10…

This study investigates the knowledge of bilingual speakers of Catalan and Spanish regarding the production of object pronominal clitics (excluding non-reflexive third-person clitics), with a focus on: (i) their morphology, considering the variants that coexist for each form, and (ii) their syntactic placement (proclitic or enclitic) with respect…

Spanish generally shows a Sequence of Tense (SOT) phenomenon in subjunctive clauses: the tense of the embedded clause (present or past) must agree with the tense of the matrix clause. It has been reported, however, that one kind of violation sometimes occurs, in which a present tense subjunctive clause is embedded under a past tense matrix clause…

This paper investigates language ideologies involving various non-standard English-language practices among homeless Ghanaian migrants, and explores how these interplay with transnational identity management in Catalonia, a non-English-speaking bilingual society. Through a 6-month multi-site ethnography of three case-study informants which…

This paper draws on a multimodal notion of metrolingualism to discuss playful T-shirt displays of Galician and Basque language, culture and identity. They invite the audience to reflect on notions of Galicianness and Basqueness by mixing localising resources such as minority language and cultural heritage with globalised resources of fluidity,…

Little is known about recruiters' attitudes to hiring 'native' and 'non-native speakers', or the factors which might influence their potential preference for the former group. Of the four studies conducted thus far, three were carried out in the US or the UK, and are over a decade old (Clark & Paran, 2007; Mahboob et al., 2004; Moussu, 2006).…

Recent language attitude research has attended to the processes involved in identifying and evaluating spoken language varieties. This article investigates the ability of second-language learners of English in Spain (N = 71) to identify Received Pronunciation (RP) and General American (GenAm) speech and their perceptions of linguistic variation…

This dissertation establishes the syntactic representation and derivation of relative clause (RC) constructions in Bizkaiera Basque. Using native speaker introspection, grammaticality judgment under direct elicitation and formal experiments, I show that Bizkaiera follows the Head raising strategy in RC construction. Evidence for this comes from…

Adolescents' attitudes towards standard Galician, non-standard Galician and Spanish are examined in this study using a matched-guise test. Results show that adolescents perceive standard and non-standard Galician differently and that different values are attached to the three linguistic varieties investigated. Our findings confirm that certain…

This exploratory study investigates the incorporation of dialectal variants in second language (L2) pronunciation and how the learning context intersects with this acquisition. Specifically, this research examines to what extent L2 learners of Spanish acquire the regional phoneme /[theta]/ from north-central Spain in both study abroad (SA) and…

The present study focuses on the language attitudes underlying patterns of stylistic variation in the speech of a female former President of the Spanish local Government of Murcia. We build on previous quantitative work demonstrating that this speaker shows unexpectedly high usage levels for nonstandard Murcian Spanish features in public speech,…