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 research project sought to explore the influence of English L2 on Spanish L1 in an environment where the L1 (Spanish) is the dominant language. Participants were recruited through voluntary response sampling at the University of Puerto Rico Secondary School (UHS). They completed a language survey on Google Forms that collected general…

A great deal of research concerning the acquisition of English morphology as a second language has been carried out in order to explain some typical stages in the acquisition of the English-s morphemes and the difficulty confronted by second language learners. According to Siegel (2003), interlanguage and functional transfer both play a crucial…

L2 learners' problems with English articles have been linked to learners' L1 and their access to universal semantic features (e.g., definiteness and specificity). Studies suggest that L2 adults rely on their L1 knowledge, while child L2 learners rely more on their access to semantic universals. The present study investigates whether child L2…

Spoken verb tense use in three groups of Spanish speakers with expressive limitations, namely, children with specific language impairment, bilingual children with first language (L1) (Spanish) attrition and adults with agrammatism, was compared in order to examine the possible impact of conversational tense frequency on expressive production.…

The purpose of this investigation was to identify how Spanish-speaking preschool children with and without specific language impairment (SLI) use the various cues available for ascribing a noun's inherent gender in the language. Via an invented word task, four types of cues were isolated and presented to each child: (1) two types of noun-internal…

Discusses the Puerto Rican dialect and its peculiar placement of subject pronouns. Notes the linguistic variety in the dialect as well as its use of verbs connotating mental and communicative activity and constructions of relativity. These distinctions give rise to the functional hypothesis to account for the peculiarities of Spanish in the…

This volume gathers a sampling of educators' ideas on the issue of the role of the non-standard dialect in the teaching of Spanish to Spanish speakers. Part one, "Rationale for the Teaching of Spanish to the Spanish Speaking," deals with philosophy and theory and contains papers by Guadalupe Valdes Fallis and Nasario Garcia. Part two,…

Investigated the potential correlation of agreement marking with the expression of pronominal subjects in the speech of 10 Spanish speakers from Puerto Rico and 10 from Spain. The results show not only similar patterns of pronominal expression but also similar rankings of constraints on pronominal expression in both dialects. (MDM)