This study examines the second language acquisition of Spanish past tense morphology by three groups of English speakers (beginners, intermediates and advanced). We adopt a novel methodological approach--combining oral corpus data with controlled experimental data--in order to provide new evidence on the validity of the Lexical Aspect Hypothesis…

Jurgen Meisel argues that "grammatical variation...can be described...in terms of parametric variation", and--crucially for his arguments in this paper--that "parameter settings do not change across the lifespan". To this extent he adopts the standard generative view, but he then departs from what he calls "the literature on historical…

This study compares mastery of gender assignment and agreement in Italian by adult Italian-German bilinguals who have acquired two languages simultaneously (2L1), and by adult German highly proficient second language learners (L2ers) of Italian. Our data show that incompleteness in bilingual acquisition and in second language (L2) acquisition…

This study compares Spanish morphosyntax error types and magnitude in monolingual Spanish and Spanish-English bilingual children with typical language development (TD) and language impairment (LI). Performance across groups was compared using cloze tasks that targeted articles, clitics, subjunctives, and derivational morphemes in 57 children.…

This study provides an account for a long-term selective loss of L1 (Russian) morpho-syntactic and content components in early immigrants to the U.S. The analysis of naturally occurring data is carried out from the perspective of two theoretical approaches--three models developed within language contact (Myers-Scotton 2002, 2005) and the…

Using a self-paced reading task, the present study investigates how highly proficient second language (L2) speakers of German with English as their native language process unambiguous "wh"-subject-extractions and "wh"-object-extractions in German. Previous monolingual research has shown that English and German exhibit different processing…

In an attempt to explain first language attrition in emigrant populations, this paper investigates the explanatory power of a framework that has--until now--received little attention: the regression hypothesis (Jakobson, 1941). This hypothesis predicts that the order of attrition is the reverse of the order of acquisition. The regression…

Any person who has taught Spanish as a second language or who has interacted with a non-native speaker of Spanish can easily tell that mastering the correct use of the copulas "ser" and "estar" is very difficult in both spoken and written production. But L2 learners are not alone. The Spanish copulas also present difficulty and frustration for L2…

In this paper, I present an exploratory study on cross-linguistic interference among Quechua-Spanish bilingual children living in a language contact situation. The study focuses on convergence in the tense, aspectual and evidentiality systems of the two languages. While in Quechua past tense features are strongly linked to evidentiality in the…

This paper presents an empirical study of how different "wh"-words behave in English speakers' L2 Chinese "wh"-questions. Our results indicate that L2 Chinese "wh"-questions are specified by the Chinese "wh" -particle ne and that there is neither variability nor L1 transfer in this aspect of L2 grammars as no "wh"-movement is found in English…

The present study investigated processing of morphologically complex words in three different frequency ranges in monolingual Finnish speakers and Finnish-Swedish bilinguals. By employing a visual lexical decision task, we found a differential pattern of results in monolinguals vs. bilinguals. Monolingual Finns seemed to process low frequency and…

To investigate decision level processes involved in bilingual word recognition tasks, Dutch-English participants had to name Dutch-English homographs in English. In a stimulus list containing items from both languages, interlingual homographs yielded longer naming latencies, more Dutch responses, and more other errors in both response languages if…