This article sheds light on the linguistic and extralinguistic conditions that determine the likelihood of L1 grammatical attrition in late sequential bilinguals. We explore whether aspectual interpretations associated with the present tense may be a vulnerable area for the native grammar of 30 late Spanish-English bilinguals who have settled in…

This article adopts the surface overlap and derivational complexity hypotheses to study crosslinguistic transfer in the adult second language (L2) acquisition of English genitive alternation (between the s-genitives and the of genitives) by intermediate and advanced Egyptian Arabic-speaking learners. While the "s"-genitive (e.g.…

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…

Research has pointed to the importance of introducing social aspects of language at the beginning stages of second language (L2) acquisition (Yates, 2017). This proof-of-concept study therefore sought to determine if an explicit pedagogical intervention consisting of various types of sociolinguistic awareness activities could be implemented with…

Direct object clitics in Latin American Spanish are subject to great variability in features across dialects. Variability also characterizes bilingual acquisition and especially clitic doubling structures in language contact contexts. We focus on the distribution of clitics and Differential Object Marking (DOM) in clitic doubling structures among…

Previous studies in the acquisition of clitic se in Spanish have focused on the syntactic processes needed to perform detransitivization. However, current approaches on event structure reveal that "se" encodes aspectual information which is crucial for its acquisition. We examine the use, intuition and interpretation of the aspectual…

According to previous research, speakers of European languages parse regularly-inflected, morphologically-complex words into stems and grammatical affixes during word recognition. In contrast, some studies suggest that late second language (L2) learners do not. We ask how these types of words are processed in Arabic, a language whose primary…

In our globalised world, the desire for the acquisition of English has led to increased research into the appropriate pedagogical approaches for learning and teaching the language. This manuscript focuses on the use of learners' mother tongue in the learning and teaching of English in an effort to identify ways in which cross-linguistic…

The chapters in this volume, all written by experts in the field, present an array of new research on second language acquisition (SLA) that touches on several current theoretical debates in the field and present a rich range of new empirical data and a number of innovative findings. The studies address questions relating to ultimate attainment,…

This paper presents a descriptive investigation on verbal and written use of past-time inflectional marker -"ed" by Indonesian English majors. Given that English has a foreign language status in Indonesia, acquiring grammatical forms and specific to this study, the -"ed" inflection, is challenging to learners. Difficulties in…

This study constitutes the first statistical analysis to employ a Bayesian multinomial probit model in the investigation of subject expression in first and second language (L2) Spanish. The study analyzes the use of third-person subject-expression forms and demonstrates that the following variables are important for subject expression:…

In this study, we investigate whether preposition stranding, a stereotypical non-standard feature of North American French, results from convergence with English, and the role of bilingual code-switchers in its adoption and diffusion. Establishing strict criteria for the validation of contact-induced change, we make use of the comparative…

This dissertation project examines the language contact situation of Chipilo, a Veneto-Spanish bilingual community of immigrant origin in central Mexico, focusing both on the social motivations for the sustained bilingualism observed and the linguistic outcomes in the Spanish of the community. Chipilo is a unique community in that Veneto, a…