The present study contributes to our understanding of the effects of age and type of linguistic input in the acquisition of Spanish as a second language in adulthood. I examine the Spanish syntax (word order) of three groups of speakers, monolingual Spanish speakers from Mexico and two bilingual English-Spanish speakers born and raised in the…

Child language acquisition research has provided ample evidence of lexical frequency effects. This corpus-based analysis introduces a novel frequency measure shown to significantly constrain adult language variation, but heretofore unexplored in child language acquisition research. Among adults, frequent occurrence of a form in a particular…

Constraints on linguistic variation are consistent across adult speakers, yielding probabilistic and systematic patterns. Yet, little is known about the development of such patterns during childhood. This study investigates Spanish subject pronoun expression in naturalistic data from 154 monolingual children in Mexico, divided into four age…

This study examined the +/- presence of Spanish subject personal pronouns ("yo," "el/ella," "nosotros/nosotras," and "ellos/ellas" ) in sociolinguistic interviews of 36 Mexican-Americans from Houston, Texas (16 of 2nd generation and 20 of 3rd generation), and 20 Mexicans (control group) from Heroica…

This self-paced reading study first tested the prediction that the garden path effect previously observed during the processing of subject-object ambiguities in native English would not obtain in a null subject language like Spanish. The investigation then further explored whether the effect would be evident among near-native readers of Spanish…

This dissertation is a comprehensive description of the grammar of Sierra Popoluca (SP, aka Soteapanec), a Mixe-Zoquean language spoken by approximately 28,000 people in Veracruz, Mexico. This grammar begins with an introduction to the language, its language family, a typological overview of the language, a brief history of my fieldwork, and the…

Recent research in language contact has investigated bilingual deviations from monolingual norms where syntax interfaces with the lexical and discourse components of the grammar (e.g. Iverson & Rothman 2008; Lozano 2006; Montrul 2004, 2005; Sorace & Filiaci 2006; Tsimpli et al. 2004). Such studies generally show that the…

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…