This article sheds light on the linguistic and extralinguistic conditions that determine the likelihood of L1 grammatical attrition in late sequential bilinguals. We explore whether aspectual interpretations associated with the present tense may be a vulnerable area for the native grammar of 30 late Spanish-English bilinguals who have settled in…

The following article recommends Texas high school English teachers to select "All the Pretty Horses" (McCarthy, 1992), the critically acclaimed, best-selling novel by Cormac McCarthy, as a reading option for students. Set in rural Texas and Mexico, "All the Pretty Horses" provides an engaging reading experience that would…

This study investigates the knowledge of bilingual speakers of Catalan and Spanish regarding the production of object pronominal clitics (excluding non-reflexive third-person clitics), with a focus on: (i) their morphology, considering the variants that coexist for each form, and (ii) their syntactic placement (proclitic or enclitic) with respect…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine changes in English past tense accuracy and errors among Spanish-English bilingual children with typical development (TD) and developmental language disorder (DLD). Method: Thirty-three children were tested before and after 1 year to examine changes in clinically relevant English past tense errors…

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…

Purpose: This work explores the clinical relevance of three measures of morpheme use for preschool-age Spanish-English bilingual children with varying language skills. The 3 measures reflect accuracy, diversity (the tense marker total), and productivity (the tense and agreement productivity score [TAP score]) of the English tense and agreement…

This study tests the Competing Systems Hypothesis (CSH) as applied to adult second language acquisition of aspect in Spanish. The CSH purports that differences among tutored and untutored learners result from competition between one system of underlying grammatical knowledge and another of learned metalinguistic knowledge in tutored learners…

Direct object clitics in Latin American Spanish are subject to great variability in features across dialects. Variability also characterizes bilingual acquisition and especially clitic doubling structures in language contact contexts. We focus on the distribution of clitics and Differential Object Marking (DOM) in clitic doubling structures among…

Purpose: This study examined the use of African American English (AAE) among a group of young Latinx bilingual children and the accuracy of the English Morphosyntax subtest of the Bilingual English-Spanish Assessment (BESA) in classifying these children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD). Method: Children (N = 81) between the…

Purpose: This single-case study examines a complexity approach to target selection in grammatical intervention in three children with varying levels of mastery of tense and agreement. Specifically, we examine whether targeting a complex tense and agreement grammatical structure (auxiliary BE in questions) leads to generalization to other less…

Previous studies in the acquisition of clitic se in Spanish have focused on the syntactic processes needed to perform detransitivization. However, current approaches on event structure reveal that "se" encodes aspectual information which is crucial for its acquisition. We examine the use, intuition and interpretation of the aspectual…

In this paper we examine the use of Guarani affixes and clitics in colloquial Paraguayan Spanish. We depart from the traditional view of these as "borrowings," and instead explore the idea that these phenomena can be integrated within Muysken's (2000, 2013, 2014) typology of code-mixing. We claim that most of these uses may stem from a…

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…

Cross-linguistically, monolingual children produce target-like inflected verbs much earlier than they can reliably distinguish between singular and plural subject-verb agreement morphology in comprehension (i.e. Johnson, V., J. de Villiers, and H. Seymour. 2005. "Agreement Without Understanding? The Case of Third Person Singular /s/."…

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…