American Norwegian (AmNo), a moribund heritage variety of Norwegian spoken predominantly in the Upper Midwest of the US, licenses "wh"-infinitives (i.e. indirect questions), which are structures that are not acceptable in either standard Norwegian Bokmål or Norwegian dialects. Adopting a spanning-account of syntax (Blix, 2021; Julien,…

Feature-based approaches to acquisition principally focus on second language (L2) learners' ability to perceive non-native consonants when the features required are either contrastively present or entirely absent from the first language (L1) grammar. As features may function contrastively or allophonically in the consonant and/or vowel systems of…

This article reports on an experimental study on the acquisition of prepositional relative clauses in second language European Portuguese by Chinese native speakers. It focuses on the role of resumption, mandatory in prepositional relative clauses in Chinese (the native language of the learners) and non-conventional in European Portuguese (the…

The present study investigated the influence of orthographic input on the recognition of second language (L2) spoken words with phonological variants, when first language (L1) and L2 have different orthographic structures. Lexical encoding for intermediate-to-advanced level Mandarin learners of Korean was assessed using masked cross-modal and…

The present study examines the production and intuition of Spanish clitics in clitic left dislocation (CLLD) structures among 26 Spanish heritage speakers (HSs) born and raised in Brazil. We tested clitic production and intuition in contexts in which Spanish clitics vary as a function of the semantic features of the object that they refer to.…

This study tests the Competing Systems Hypothesis (CSH) as applied to adult second language acquisition of aspect in Spanish. The CSH purports that differences among tutored and untutored learners result from competition between one system of underlying grammatical knowledge and another of learned metalinguistic knowledge in tutored learners…

Grammar competition has been proposed as a model for second language (L2) acquisition. Variational Learning provides a framework within which to investigate the idea of grammar competition as the model requires a marriage of quantitative properties of the input with Universal Grammar. A diachronic variational model of grammar competition is…

This study builds on prior research on second language (L2) Spanish psych verbs, which has centered on morphosyntactic properties, by examining their syntactic distribution, which relies on lexical semantic knowledge. The fact that certain forms are licensed for some verbs, but not others, is the result of an underlying lexical semantic difference…

The present study examines the tradeoff between the on-line construction of modifier-noun gender agreement and verb-subject person/number agreement vs. the automatization and entrenchment of agreement, through the study of bilingual speakers of Spanish and the Afro-Colombian creole language Palenquero, whose lexicon is highly cognate with Spanish,…

The article by Amaral and Roeper (this issue; henceforth A&R) presents many interesting ideas about first and second language acquisition as well as some experimental data convincingly illustrating the difference between production and comprehension. The article extends the concept of Universal Bilingualism proposed in Roeper (1999) to second…

Native speakers show systematic variation in a range of linguistic domains as a function of a variety of sociolinguistic variables. This article addresses native language variation in the context of multicompetence, i.e. knowledge of two languages in one mind (Cook, 1991). Descriptions of motion were elicited from functionally monolingual and…

The present article provides an exploration of ultimate attainment in second language (L2) and its limitations. It is argued that the question of maturational constraints can best be investigated when the reference population is bilingual and exposed on a regular basis to varieties of their first language (L1) that show cross-linguistic influence.…

Two accounts of the variable use of inflection in adult second language (L2) acquisition are examined: The Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis (MSIH) and the Impaired Representation Hypothesis (IRH). These hypotheses make different predictions for adult L2 acquisition. Spontaneous production data from two adult learners of French and two adult…

Discusses the implications of the tendency of adult second-language learners to develop a well-structured, simple form of language outside the classroom, i.e. the Basic Variety (BV). Focuses on the structural properties of the BV, the status of these properties and the reasons why some structural properties of "fully fledged" languages are more…

Tested whether the predictions of a particular syntactically based theory about partial availability of universal grammar in post-critical-period second-language acquisition can provide insight into the acquisition of English restrictive relative clauses. (48 references) (Author/CK)