The Null Subject Parameter (NSP) has long been considered pertinent to Second Language Acquisition (SLA) studies, especially when the native language (NL) and target language (TL) have different NSP settings. The study aimed to investigate whether seventy English L2 learners in Puerto Rico who were native Spanish speakers transferred their L1…

The Portuguese present perfect (P-PP) is an understudied topic in the field of generative language acquisition. In the past decade, Third Language Acquisition (L3A) has enjoyed special attention in studying how multilingualism works. Researchers have concentrated on the examination of the source of transfer at the initial stages. However, there is…

This project examined the acquisition of third person accusative clitics in Spanish by Chinese-speaking learners. Specifically, it focused on the role of cross-linguistic influence and patterns of language exposure and use in the acquisition of the syntactic and semantic properties constraining the production and intuition of overt and null…

The present dissertation intends to investigate the syntactic nature and L2-acquisition of passive sentence structure in two Romance varieties, Italian and Spanish. First, I will present an analytic proposal couched within the Generative Approach (Chomsky, 1957, and subsequent work); from there, and following Perlmutter and Postal's (1977)…

The present study contributes to our understanding of the effects of age and type of linguistic input in the acquisition of Spanish as a second language in adulthood. I examine the Spanish syntax (word order) of three groups of speakers, monolingual Spanish speakers from Mexico and two bilingual English-Spanish speakers born and raised in the…

English ditransitive verbs show a complex alternation between the double object construction (DOC, (1)) and prepositional object datives (POD, (2)). This dissertation examines the acquisition, representation, and learnability of the dative alternation among L2 English learners, presenting experimental data from participants with L1 backgrounds of…

Since the inception of Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz, 1993), there have been two notable, but preliminary, analyses of Spanish gender and word class within this framework: Harris (1999) and Kramer (2015). This dissertation fills in the gaps left by these partial analyses for nominals in particular. It presents a novel word class…

We examined spelling errors patterns, cohesive ties, and syntax features in English and Spanish essays written by Spanish-English emergent bilinguals in Grades 1, 2, and 3 (N = 278; 51% female) enrolled in either English immersion or English-Spanish dual immersion programs. In Study 1, we addressed whether students made consistent spelling errors…

Adult first language (L1) English speakers who are advanced second language (L2) learners of Spanish demonstrate near-ceiling levels of accuracy for some features of Spanish, such as [Person] and [Number] for verbs (McCarthy, 2012; Rodgers, 2011). While for other features, such as [Aspect] for copulas (i.e. ser and estar), and [Person] and…

From a usage-based approach, this dissertation explores the relationship between structural variability and discourse subjectivity in a series of interviews from the "New Mexico and Southern Colorado Spanish Survey" (Bills and Vigil 2008). Focusing on the use of cognitive and speech verbs, the analysis will demonstrate that a) structural…

The objective of the current study is to contribute to the larger body of sociophonetic variation research by describing and analyzing Spanish as spoken in a small Puerto Rican community in the US. First, I describe phonological and morphosyntactic features of Spanish as used by four different groups of Puerto Rican informants in Amsterdam, New…

Second language (L2) writing has been determined to be influenced by what is read, with language learners tending to borrow words and short phrases from input texts while writing (e.g., Wang & Wang, 2015). This phenomenon is referred to as lexical alignment. Only one empirical study has investigated the influence that the linguistic complexity…

Mixed languages like Media Lengua incorporate grammar from one source language (here, Quichua) but lexicon from another (here, Spanish). Due to their linguistic profile, they provide a unique window into bilingual language usage and language representation. Drawing on sociolinguistic, structural and psycholinguistic perspectives, the current…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to explore the phonological development of Spanish-speaking preschoolers who are acquiring African American English (AAE) in North Carolina (NC). Understanding the phonological structure of the Spanish-AAE language combination will improve diagnostic accuracy for this group of children. Method: Four Black…

The study abroad (SA) experience is often viewed as an opportunity to gain proficiency in a foreign language due to immersion in the target language and culture. Nevertheless, the increased amount of research conducted on SA over the last two decades indicates that it does not necessarily lead to gains in all areas (Collentine & Freed, 2004;…