Research has demonstrated that features of lexical and lexicogrammatical use are important predictors of productive second language (L2) proficiency (e.g. Kyle et al. 2018). While some features of lexical use have been studied with L2s other than English (e.g. Tracy-Ventura 2017), multivariate lexical and lexicogrammatical approaches in these L2s…

This article presents results of two off-line comprehension tasks investigating the acceptability of unconventional and conventional metonymy by native speakers of Korean and Spanish who speak English as a second language. We are interested in discovering whether learners differentiate between conventional and unconventional metonymy, and whether…

Language aptitude remains one of the most understudied predictor variables in L1 attrition research. The current study seeks to address this gap by investigating the effects of language aptitude on L1 retention in late attriters. Forty L1 Spanish-L2 Swedish bilinguals living in Sweden participated in the study, along with 20 functionally…

The aim of this article is to describe the grammatical patterns of a set of nouns frequently used in Spanish specialized discourse: the so-called "semiterms". The following nouns were selected for the study: "problema" "problem", "resultado" "result", "motivo" "motive/reason", "razon" "reason", and "consecuencia" "consequence". Apart from…

Two-way immersion (TWI) programs in the US are not reaching their minority language learning potential. While English home language (EHL) students develop functional proficiency, their minority language (e.g., Spanish) remains grammatically inaccurate. Spanish home language (SHL) students may also develop non-native-like aspects. Scholars suggest…

This article documents how second language (L2) Spanish learners in an American high school formulated explicit grammar rules during three inductive lessons on the pronominal clitic "se." Following Adair-Hauck "et al." (2010), each lesson first presented a property of "se" within a narrative text, and then had learners inductively "Co-construct"…

The present study adds to our understanding of how learners employ lexical and grammatical phenomena to communicate in writing in different types of interlanguage discourse. A multidimensional (factor) analysis of a corpus of L2 Spanish writing (202,241 words) generated by second- and third-year, university-level learners was performed. The…

While language aptitude has been investigated actively within second language research, there is a current dearth of research on the effects of aptitude in cases of attrition. The aim of the present investigation was to explore the role of language aptitude for L1 proficiency in speakers who experienced a break with their L1 setting prior to…

Seeks to establish connections between two different language contact phenomena, interlanguage, and code switching. Data for the study come from an interlanguage corpus that has English as the target language, but also contains material from the speaker's two first languages, Spanish and German; and a German-English code switching corpus…