This study investigates knowledge of gender agreement in Spanish L2 learners and heritage speakers, who differ in age and context/mode of acquisition. On some current theoretical accounts, persistent difficulty with grammatical gender in adult L2 acquisition is due to age. These accounts predict that heritage speakers should be more accurate on…

This article addresses the situation of lower-proficiency heritage language learners of Spanish in terms of their linguistic similarities to second language learners. The analysis highlights grammatical and lexical features in the oral discourse of Spanish heritage and second language learners at intermediate and advanced levels of study,…

USING THE METHODOLOGY DEVISED BY JEAN BERKO (1958) TO TEST AMERICAN CHILDREN ON THEIR INTERNALIZATION OF ENGLISH GRAMMATICAL RULES, 92 MEXICAN CHILDREN OF CIUDAD GUZMAN, JALISCO, WERE TESTED TO DETERMINE THEIR INTERNALIZATION OF SPANISH GRAMMAR. THE CHILDREN WERE FROM THE LOWER SOCIO-ECONOMIC CLASS, AS WERE THE 18 ADULTS WHO TOOK THE SAME TEST TO…

Part of a continuing series. (DS)

Attempts to formulate practical objectives in teaching foreign language classes. Phase one presents materials, and phase two relates grammatical structures and textbook materials to students' own interest and personal experience. (DS)

Hierarchical models of agrammatism propose that sentence production deficits can be accounted for in terms of clausal syntactic structure [Friedmann, N., & Grodzinsky, Y. (1997). "Tense and agreement in agrammatic production: Pruning the syntactic tree." "Brain and Language, 56", 397-425; Hagiwara, H. (1995). "The breakdown of functional…

Discusses the various ways to use the adverbs meaning perhaps" in Spanish. (DS)

Two experiments were carried out to investigate the processing of the empty category PRO and the time-course of this in Spanish. Eye movements were recorded while participants read sentences in which a matrix clause was followed by a subordinate infinitival clause, so that the subject or the object of the main clause could act as controller of…

We examine the inflectional productions of seven Catalan, seven Galician, and seven Spanish speaking agrammatic subjects in an elicitation and a sentence repetition task and consider them in the light of the Tree Pruning Hypothesis (TPH). The results show relatively spared subject person/number agreement with the verb and impaired tense marking…

Six experiments explored how native and non-native Spanish speakers process article-noun sequences in real time, using eye movements as a response measure. Can listeners use gender-marked articles ("la" and "el", the feminine and masculine forms of "the") to rapidly identify familiar and novel nouns? In Experiment 1, adults who learned Spanish as…

This is the seventeenth Spanish lesson in a regular series. It contains a passage from the writings of Pio Baroja. The exercises include questions on the passage and its vocabulary, exercises on the syntax of verbs, with emphasis on the subjunctive, translation exercises from English, and other drills. (Text is in Spanish.) (TL)

This qualitative study in an English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) elementary classroom examined teacher and student functional uses of language, particularly code-switching and code-mixing use. Results found that, of the instances of code-switching and code-mixing observed, none were grammatically inappropriate for either English, Spanish, or the…

The basic functions of the Academy are the editing of a grammar and a dictionary. The article suggests some improvements for the more expeditious and efficient publication of the dictionary. (Text is in Spanish.) (DS)

This document consists of the four issues of a newsletter published during 1994. Issues contain current events articles in Spanish and classroom language learning activities based on those articles. The articles are brief, most reproduced from other publications. Topics include celebrity news, the arts, Spanish culture and geography, sports, and…