This study investigates the acquisition and maintenance of periphrastic and se-passives in second language (L2), heritage (HS), and (Spanish-dominant) native Spanish speakers (NS) by addressing: (i) How accessible are Spanish periphrastic passives (which also exist in English) and se-passives (unique to Spanish) for L2ers and HSs in production?…

This mixed methods study draws upon theoretical perspectives from usage-based linguistics (UBL) and variationist sociolinguistics to explore four learners' use of second language (L2) Spanish present tense indicative verbal inflectional morphology (i.e., simple present conjugations). The study compares the frequency and distribution of students'…

There is a significant diaspora of Mixtec people residing along California's Central Coast, mostly working in the agricultural sector. The new realities in the diaspora have brought Mixtec varieties in contact in new contexts where they co-exist with other Mexican Indigenous languages, as well as with Spanish and English. We urgently need more…

Since the inception of Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz, 1993), there have been two notable, but preliminary, analyses of Spanish gender and word class within this framework: Harris (1999) and Kramer (2015). This dissertation fills in the gaps left by these partial analyses for nominals in particular. It presents a novel word class…

The interaction between root (i.e. non-epistemic) modal verbs and functional heads like tense and aspect has been investigated in a wealth of recent literature, particularly in the context of counterfactual conditionals (Iatridou, 2000; Arregui, 2009; a.o.) and actuality entailments (Bhatt, 1999; Hacquard, 2006). In this work, I continue this…

Spanish generally shows a Sequence of Tense (SOT) phenomenon in subjunctive clauses: the tense of the embedded clause (present or past) must agree with the tense of the matrix clause. It has been reported, however, that one kind of violation sometimes occurs, in which a present tense subjunctive clause is embedded under a past tense matrix clause…

Study 1: The present work examined the connection between language and conceptual development, investigating whether false-belief reasoning (FBR) and source-monitoring ability (SMA) abilities within the theory of mind (ToM) framework constrained the comprehension of semantic and pragmatic knowledge (evidential scalar implicatures) encoded in the…

Mandarin Chinese and Spanish are both considered aspect languages for the simple reason that they both mark grammatical aspect morphologically: the former attaches a particle expressing only aspectual meaning to the root of a verb, while the latter attaches a suffix expressing both aspectual and tense meaning to the root of a verb. Since tense…

Negation has been researched in second language acquisition in several languages (Bernini 2000; Donaldson 2017; Eskildsen 2012). However, there are very few studies that have discussed the acquisition of negation in L2 Spanish. In Alexandrino's (2010) dissertation, Grammaticality Judgment Tasks are employed to indicate that the acquisition of…

This study contributes to what is known about the nature of unbalanced bilingualism that emerges in language contact situations by examining the morphological knowledge of Spanish receptive heritage bilinguals (RHBs). RHBs were exposed to Spanish in their homes and communities but received formal schooling in English. These bilinguals have been…

This thesis examines whether native, heritage, and L2 speakers of Spanish engage a morphological layer of representation in the processing of inflected words, and whether they do so with both regularly- and irregularly-inflected words. Also examined is whether this tendency towards compositional (i.e. morphological rule-based) processing is…

Child speech is highly variable. The speech apparatus--the vocal tract, tongue, teeth, and vocal folds--develop at different rates for different children, which helps explain some of the variability in children's speech. For example, the ratio of the oral to pharyngeal cavities changes as children age, making it difficult to establish reliable…

This dissertation explores Spanish nominal plural formation from a morphophonological perspective. The primary objective is to better understand heritage bilinguals' (HBs') phonological categorization of the morphological element of number in their heritage language. This is done by way of picture-naming elicitation tasks of consonant-final nouns…

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 work develops a computational methodology new to linguistics that empirically evaluates competing linguistic theories on Spanish verbal mood choice through the use of computational techniques to learn mood and other hidden linguistic features from Spanish belief statements found in corpora. The machine learned probabilistic linguistic models…