The Spanish verbal system offers more evidence for agreement and tense than English, where morphological evidence is less robust. With a focus on the comprehension of verbal agreement morphology by child second (L2) learners of Spanish and English, we extend the Variational Learning account to L2 acquisition to investigate whether the abundance of…

This study investigated cross-linguistic priming in six-year-old, balanced Spanish-English bilinguals (n = 60). We examined bilinguals' production of transitive forms in English (active, passive) after exposure to Spanish transitives (Study 1; M age = 6.2 years; SD = 0.3) and their production of transitive forms in Spanish (active, passive) after…

Learning a language is more than learning its vocabulary and grammar. For example, compared with English, Spanish uses many more path verbs such as "ascender" ("to move upward") and "salir" ("to go out"), and expresses manner of motion optionally. English, in contrast, has many manner verbs (e.g., "run,…