We examined how age of acquisition in Spanish heritage speakers and L2 learners interacts with implicitness vs. explicitness of tasks in gender processing of canonical and non-canonical ending nouns. Twenty-three Spanish native speakers, 29 heritage speakers, and 33 proficiency-matched L2 learners completed three on-line spoken word recognition…

The use of social vs. cognitive approaches to the study of second language acquisition (SLA) has engendered considerable debate in the field. For instance, the recent "Modern Language Journal" Focus Issue (Lafford, 2007a) reviewed the ongoing debate between scholars espousing socially- and cognitively-grounded approaches to SLA research and…