Previous research indicates that the development of mood selection in Spanish spans several years and ends in the mastery of mood selection with sentential complements to express complex semantic meanings. The present study investigates this underexplored late stage by examining how Spanish-speaking children acquire adultlike mood selection in…

The present study is designed to investigate whether children's difficulties with subject-to-subject raising (StSR) are due to intervention effects. We examine English-speaking children's comprehension of StSR with "seem" and Spanish-speaking children's comprehension of StSR with "parecer" 'seem,' a configuration never before…

It is well known that mental state verbs are difficult to acquire, but little is known about the acquisition of mental state language encoded through intonation. Puerto Rican Spanish (PRS) has at least three intonation contours available for marking polar questions (PQs): ¡H*L% marks an utterance as a PQ; H+L*L%, in addition to doing the former,…

This study contributes to current trends of heritage speaker bilingualism research by examining the syntax of so-called Spanish dative-experiencer predicates ("gustar"-like verbs). Building on previous findings (e.g., Silva-Corvalán 1994; Toribio and Nye 2006), it is hypothesized that Spanish heritage speakers can project an optional…

The present study fills a need for investigations of learner and native speaker (NS) interpretation of the Spanish subjunctive in contexts that allow variation. The analysis compares responses by NSs and three levels of learners on a written interpretation task in which each item contained a temporal indicator ("cuando" "when",…

The population of Spanish-speaking preschoolers in the United States continues to increase and there is a significant need to develop psychometrically sound early language and literacy screening measures to accurately capture children's ability in Spanish. In this paper, we describe the innovative design and calibration process of the new…

This study examined the +/- presence of Spanish subject personal pronouns ("yo," "el/ella," "nosotros/nosotras," and "ellos/ellas" ) in sociolinguistic interviews of 36 Mexican-Americans from Houston, Texas (16 of 2nd generation and 20 of 3rd generation), and 20 Mexicans (control group) from Heroica…

This study contributes to current trends of heritage speaker (HS) acquisition research by examining the syntax of psych-predicates in HS Spanish. Broadly defined, psych-predicates communicate states of emotions (e.g., to love) and have traditionally been categorized as belonging to one of three classes: class I--"temere" "to…

Extensive studies have been conducted regarding mother tongue (L1) interference and developing English writing skills. This study, however, aims to investigate the influence of the Spanish language on second language (L2) writing skills at several Ecuadorian senior high schools in Loja. To achieve this, 351 students and 42 teachers from second…

This study examines Spanish [Verb + Noun (V + N)] compounds based on insights drawn from Construction Grammar. In contrast to previous studies that treat Spanish [V + N] compounds as having one common structural and semantic property, this study proposes two types of [V + N] compound constructions in Spanish, each with its own respective…

Proponents of Processing Instruction (VanPatten, 2005) claim that learners benefit most when presented with both referential and affective structured input activities. Following a classic pretest-posttest design, the present study investigates the role of these two types of activities on the learning of the Spanish subjunctive. Groups differed…

Spanish-speaking (SS) children with language impairment (LI) present with deficits in morphology and verb argument structure. These language areas may be useful for clinical identification of affected children. This study aimed to evaluate the discrimination accuracy of spontaneous language measures with SS preschoolers to tease out what…

It has been claimed that speakers of Spanish and English have different patterns of thinking for speaking about motion both linguistically and gesturally (Stam 1998; McNeill and Duncan 2000; McNeill 2000; Kellerman and van Hoof 2003; Neguerela et al. 2004). For example, Spanish speakers' path gestures tend to occur with path verbs, while English…

This study analyzes and compares the Spanish utterances of children between 2.0 and 4.6 years of age. The focus is on two aspects of children's speech: the production of verb tenses and the use of temporal expressions, such as adverbs of time. Four Spanish-speaking children, two male and two female, were interviewed for a total of two hours…

Results of a study of linguistic structure acquisition by children aged 18 to 24 months whose first language is Spanish include inventories of verbs and nouns used by the children and show which tenses appear first and in which order and the appearance of noun plurals and articles with nouns. (SB)