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…

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…

This study compares monolinguals and different kinds of bilinguals with respect to their knowledge of the type of lexical phenomenon known as collocation. Collocations are word combinations that speakers use recurrently, forming the basis of conventionalized lexical patterns that are shared by a linguistic community. Examples of collocations…

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.…

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…

The acquisition of Spanish as a first language was investigated in a study of eight Puerto Rican children ranging in age from 17-39 months. The speech of the four children studied in Puerto Rico was analyzed in detail and compared with that of the four children taped in Boston. The children's speech was taped in natural situations and analyzed in…

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)