The goal of this paper is to tease apart two approaches to the source of children's consistent scope assignment in negative sentences containing logical connectives: the Semantic Subset Principle and the Semantic Subset Maxim. Previous developmental work has observed that four- to six-year-old children across languages have difficulty with…

The present study investigated the second language processing of grammatical mood in Spanish. Eye-movement data from a group of advanced proficiency second language users revealed nativelike processing with irregular verb stimuli but not with regular verb stimuli. A comparison group of native speakers showed the expected effect with both types of…

Considering the acquisition of past tense uses by L2 Spanish advanced learners with closely related L1s (French, Portuguese), this study attempts to identify factors associated with variability, such as negative transfer or interface integration. We report data on the acquisition, by adult L1 French and Portuguese learners at B2 and C1 CEFR…

Investigating the L2 temporality, most previous studies within the Aspect Hypothesis framework focused on the basic meanings or prototypical uses of past morphology. The present study, however, including other less prototypical uses of past morphology, addresses 2 questions: (i) how the uses of simple past and past progressive morphology change as…

The aim of this article is to show that the use of Spanish grammatical aspect is biased by inherent aspect depending on the learner's first language (L1). It considers both the Lexical Aspect Hypothesis (LAH; Andersen, 1986, and his followers) and the L1 Transfer Hypothesis (Izquierdo & Collins, 2008; McManus, 2015), and it compares the use of…

In this essay, I apply current linguistic theory to reanalyze earlier research on the acquisition of "ser" and "estar" (e.g., VanPatten 1985, 1987). Using insights from Roby and Schmitt ("Semi-Copulas"), for example, I argue that the acquisition of the copular verbs is an issue of the acquisition of their aspectual properties (see also Bruhn de…

The Cognition Hypothesis (Robinson 2005) claims that pedagogic tasks should be sequenced for learners in an order of increasing cognitive complexity, and that along resource-directing dimensions of task demands increasing effort at conceptualization promotes more complex and grammaticized second language (L2) speech production. This article…