An accurate portrayal of contemporary Spanish in Costa Rica necessitates the inclusion of a discussion of forms of address. Costa Rica is commonly listed among the countries that include "voseo" as part of its pronominal paradigm. The present descriptive study elucidates the sociolinguistic reality of "voseo" in Costa Rica and…

The present study examines the lack of representation of minority communities in the existing literature by examining the representation of Afro-Latinxs in texts and visuals in seven Spanish as a Heritage Language (SHL) textbooks, and the ideologies behind these representations. Drawing upon Norman Fairclough's (1995) model for conducting Critical…

Many bilingual preservice teachers in Texas are not able to get certified because of language limitations. Although they have grown up listening and speaking their native language at home, with family and friends, many face challenges when using academic language in a formal setting. There is a mismatch between their language level and their…

Aragonese is a threatened Romance language immersed in a historical process of substitution by Spanish, the official language. The number of speakers who maintained its transmission to younger generations, mainly in rural areas, has extremely declined over the last century. In the meantime, revitalisation efforts have incorporated new speakers,…

Recent empirical research in sociolinguistics and social psychology has established the existence of the socio-psychological phenomena known as linguistic stereotyping (LS) and reverse linguistic stereotyping (RLS), which have an implicit or unconscious effect on listeners' perception of speech and speakers. Despite such findings, little research…

As Spanish heritage language (SHL) programs grow nationwide, SHL program directors (PD) are tasked with negotiating the intricacies of either building an SHL program from scratch or carving space for a program that, unlike second language (L2) programs, are not institutionalised. Considering the evidence of deeply embedded dominant language…

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…

This study investigated classroom interaction through the framework of "stancetaking" (Du Bois, 2007) to understand how Spanish second language (L2) learners positioned themselves when participating in communicative language learning activities. Data came from transcribed audio and video recordings of three 90-minute lessons in one…

The study compares the uses of the native-speaker concept as a legitimizing resource in language-standard ideologies and normative discourse in five languages of European origin. Much research and international discussion has focused on the native speaker of English, a symbolically international language. We aim to show how the native-speaker…

Existing research on second language (L2) pronoun resolution has not yet looked at immediate and cumulative priming effects. By using a sentence comprehension task, the present study aims at priming dis-preferred interpretations for ambiguous pronouns. We test a group of native speakers and a group of intermediate-proficiency L2 learners of…

This study builds on prior research on second language (L2) Spanish psych verbs, which has centered on morphosyntactic properties, by examining their syntactic distribution, which relies on lexical semantic knowledge. The fact that certain forms are licensed for some verbs, but not others, is the result of an underlying lexical semantic difference…

This study examines the variable occurrence of preposition duplication in contexts of coordination in Spanish (e.g., "Fui con mi madre y (con) mi padre"). We build on previous research on this variable morphosyntactic phenomenon (namely, prepositions in contexts of coordination) by expanding the type of data and the independent variables…

As Spanish heritage courses multiply all over the United States, the need to reexamine the curriculum and pedagogical approaches that are most appropriate to meet instructional goals is becoming increasingly pressing. Although several researchers have called for developing students' critical language awareness (CLA) in the Spanish heritage…

Research on nativelike variation in second language (L2) systems indicates that learners studying abroad may adapt to regional norms as they build sociolinguistic competence (e.g., Kanwit & Solon, 2013; Salgado-Robles, 2014). Spanish exhibits variation between the intensifiers "muy" [very] and "bien" [very] across numerous…

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…