The Spanish subjunctive mood (SUBJ) is said to be highly vulnerable in heritage language (HL) acquisition. However, there is little controlled research on HL-speaking children acquiring the various Spanish SUBJ contexts, so we do not have a clear picture of when, how, or why heritage speakers (HSs) develop in the SUBJ as they do. This study tests…

This study investigated the occurrence of incidental focus on form in an under-researched context, i.e. the intact foreign language classroom with near-beginner adolescent learners. Two classes of near-beginner learners of L2 French and of L2 Spanish participated in the study. All interactions involving the teacher and a proportion of the students…

Conventional wisdom holds that children learn languages implicitly whereas older learners learn languages explicitly, and some have claimed that after puberty only explicit language learning is possible. However, older learners often receive more explicit instruction than child L2 learners, which may affect their learning strategies. This study…

To investigate the development of the NP selection process, preferences for overt or null Spanish subject pronouns were elicited from 139 children (5;09 to 15;08) and 30 adults in Mexico. Participants were told stories in which consecutive grammatical subjects shared the same referent (same-reference), or did not (switch-reference). In the…

Twelve teenagers of Puerto Rican origin were interviewed to determine their proficiency in speaking and understanding Spanish. Three levels of oral Spanish proficiency were established as reference points on a continuum by using self-ratings, peer-ratings, and self-reports of usage. These impressions were verified by the number and type of errors…

This research is an attempt to determine the relative influence of Black English and Puerto Rican Spanish in the speech of Puerto Ricans raised contiguous to the black community in Harlem. The first chapter provides a general introduction to the study of this variety of Puerto Rican English and a description of the sample on which this study is…

Papers on language research in this volume include the following: Phonetique ou phonologie: le chva dans les emprunts anglais en portugais (Phonetics or Phonology: The Schwa in English Loan Words to Portuguese) (Pascale Belanger); NewsExpert: exemple de l'application de la linguistique informatique a Internet (NewsExpert: An Example of Its…

Thirty-five papers, all but one in French, presented at the conference on research in linguistics are presented here. Topics include: verb tenses in English; computerized text analysis program; study of specialized terminology; court translation in Canada; subject-verb agreement in English; bilingual editing; swearing with religious words;…