The English Resultative Construction (ERC) is a satellite-framed structure with no identical equivalent in Spanish. In a series of studies, we analyzed and compared recognition (acceptability judgment task) and comprehension (sentence comprehension task) of three ERC subtypes with the English Depictive Construction (EDC) (which has a Spanish…

The system of second person singular forms of address (2PS) in Medellín, Colombia is tripartite consisting of "tú, vos," and "usted," while also including the existence of a dual "usted." The current study compares usage of the intimate "usted" versus the distant "usted" with data from an oral…

Standard Spanish grammar states that desideratives ("querer que"), directives ("aconsejar que"), purpose clauses ("para que"), causatives ("hacer que"), emotive-factives ("alegrarse de que"), negated epistemics ("no creer que"), dubitatives ("dudar que"), and modals ("ser…

Recent studies in the second language acquisition of negation have focused on polarity items and their licensing contexts. Although several studies show a correlation between higher degrees of second language (L2) proficiency and the acquisition of the target L2 structures, less attention has been given to the relation between the acquisition of…

Evidence that L2 learners of Spanish overgeneralize indirect object pronouns (OPs) to direct object contexts with human referents and direct OPs to indirect object contexts with nonhuman referents has been provided by Zyzik (2006), Malovrh (2008), and Olsen and Juffs (2022). However, the effect of instruction on this phenomenon has not been…

The present study is designed to investigate whether children's difficulties with subject-to-subject raising (StSR) are due to intervention effects. We examine English-speaking children's comprehension of StSR with "seem" and Spanish-speaking children's comprehension of StSR with "parecer" 'seem,' a configuration never before…

Spanish native speakers are known to pronounce onset /sC/ clusters in English with a prothetic vowel, as in "esport" for sport, due to their native language phonotactic constraints. We assessed whether accurate production of e.g. "spi" instead of "espi" was related to accurate perceptual discrimination of this…

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…

Many languages encode phi-features via overt morphology, yet children's use of this morphology in comprehension tasks varies widely. Here, we use a picture-selection task to test comprehension of Spanish verbal agreement and clitics, comparing performance across and within each paradigm to examine the effect of two factors: (i) phonological…

The Imperfect/Preterite aspectual contrast is one of the most studied topics in Spanish as a second language research. However, there are few works focused on describing the acquisition of modal uses of the Imperfect by L2 speakers. This paper investigates the L1 Russian L2 Spanish speakers' mastery of politeness, evidential and nonfactual modal…

This study compares the effects of distributed versus massed corrective feedback (CF) on Spanish differential object marking (DOM). Forty-eight Spanish learners completed three communicative tasks with a researcher on three consecutive days, one task per day. Partial recasts were used to reformulate DOM errors. The distributed group (n = 16)…

Following calls for more modality-sensitive perspectives of SLA, this study investigated the extent to which (a) producing the second language (L2) in the oral modality impacts learner-generated noticing and L2 development of grammatical structures embedded in subsequent auditory input, and whether (b) engaging in L2 production and input…

Text chat facilitates L2 use by providing learners with extended time to plan, monitor, and process production during interactional tasks. However, learners may not naturally take advantage of these affordances, especially for providing peer feedback. This study used video-enhanced chat scripts to examine the behavior of beginner L2 Spanish…

Recent approaches to the "that"-trace phenomenon in English include syntactic analyses based on the principle of Anti-locality and a sentence production analysis based on the Principle of End Weight. These analyses have many similarities, but they differ in their predictions for second language (L2) speakers. In an Anti-locality…

Verbal morphology has been identified as a particularly vulnerable domain for adult heritage speakers (HSs) of Spanish, especially when it involves the selection of subjunctive mood. A minimal amount is known, however, about the potential effects of the variability associated with these forms on the acquisition of related epiphenomena, such as the…