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Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research Questions: This study investigated the acquisition of Spanish Differential Object Marking (DOM) by bilingual and monolingual Spanish teenagers, evaluating to which extent their knowledge of DOM can be explained by different theories of acquisition. Design/Methodology/Approach: Two experiments with bilingual and monolingual Spanish teenagers (ages 10 to 15) were conducted. The experiments included an Elicited Production Completion Task, in which a space was to either be filled with an object marker or left blank, and a Context-Matching Acceptability Judgment Task. Data and Analysis: 54 subjects (44 bilinguals and 10 monolinguals) were tested. For both tasks, there were 6 conditions testing different syntactic–semantic features that trigger DOM (test items n = 42 in each task). The data were analysed with linear regressions and repeated measures analyses of variance. Findings/Conclusions: This study’s results show that bilingual teenagers do not demonstrate significant differences from age-matched monolinguals in their competence regarding the syntactic–semantic properties of DOM. Both groups are below ceiling in showing evidence of knowledge about all the syntactic–semantic features involved in DOM, indicating the possibility of a significant delay beyond childhood in their acquisition. Originality: There are few previous studies on the acquisition of DOM, and none which consider the full range of features and specific population considered here. Work by Montrul focuses on the animacy feature, while Guijarro-Fuentes considers the full range of features, but for adult L2 learners of Spanish. Significance/Implications: This study shows that the Interface Vulnerability Hypothesis, the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis, the Full Access/Full Transfer Hypothesis and the Interpretability Hypothesis have limitations in explaining its results. Instead, a feature-based approach is proposed in which the specification of features beyond animacy raises difficulties for the acquisition of DOM until late childhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims and Objectives: This study explored the extent to which bilingual language exposure and practice might alter the way in which bilingual first-generation adult speakers use deictic demonstratives in their first language (Spanish) after immersion in a new language environment (Norwegian). Fully developed L1 systems are expected to be stable and less susceptible to change or restructuring than child systems. In addition, core domains of a language such as deictic demonstrative reference are hypothesized to be more robust. Design: Participants were tested with the Spanish version of the memory game. They completed an ethnolinguistic background questionnaire with questions targeting demographic data, experience with language, and daily routines in language use. Data and analyses: Demonstrative use was analysed using binomial multilevel modelling, allowing residual variance to be partitioned into a between-participant component and a within-participant component. Findings: Results demonstrate a shift in the demonstrative system of Spanish native speakers who have resided in Norway for a median of 6.5 years. This shift is reflected in extensive use of the semantically underspecified item ese at the expense of the form aquel. The latter form is less frequent and highly context-dependent in corpora of the modern language. It can be hypothesized that first-generation speakers are faster in converging on a simplified system of deictic reference than the native speaker group tested in Spain, but this development parallels tendencies observed in the monolingual variety of the language. This faster shift may well be influenced and catalysed by bilingual language practice. Originality: This article addresses a gap in research on deictic terms under conditions of language attrition. It documents a restructuring of the deictic system in first-generation speakers of Spanish residing in another country. The results suggest that marking peri-personal space is a core feature of deictic systems across languages, also preserved under deictic system shift. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the author discusses various reports within the issue on topics including child bilingualism, the gender feature acquisition of two Basque-Spanish bilingual children, and second language (L2) acquisition.

In this article, we sought to investigate the acquisition of gender features by two Basque–Spanish bilingual children when compared to a Spanish monolingual child. Basque is a language that lacks gender features and nominal agreement, whereas Spanish classifies nouns into two classes, that is, masculine and feminine, and has determiner phrase internal agreement. The internal architecture of Basque and Spanish differ on two crucial ways: the presence or absence of agreement and the presence or absence of the syntactic projection ClassP. Hence, the acquisition of gender sheds some light on the internal architecture of the determiner phrase. The studies on gender acquisition by Spanish monolinguals or bilinguals of any combination are not numerous. For this reason, we provide a detailed description of gender development and a thorough analysis of gender errors by a monolingual Spanish child and two Basque–Spanish bilinguals. This study shows that the masculine is not the default gender, neither for the monolingual child analysed nor for bilinguals because both groups overgeneralize masculine as well as feminine. Moreover, none of the children exclusively use the masculine with all nouns at a first stage to converge to target grammar in a subsequent stage. Basque–Spanish bilinguals use masculine determiners with feminine nouns in the majority of contexts from the outset of language acquisition, whereas the monolingual child performs the opposite way. Interestingly, bilinguals require more time to acquire the intricacies of Spanish gender. In other words, they make gender errors even at advanced stages of development, when the monolingual Spanish child studied in this article presents a target-like gender performance. The analysed data show that Basque influences Spanish, resulting in language delay because of the internal architecture of the determiner phrase and to a minor extent by the surface overlap between Spanish and Basque. However, our interpretation is cautious because of the scarcity of such examples and the limited corpus available. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study investigates the extent to which advanced native-English L2 learners of Spanish come to acquire restrictions on bare plural preverbal subjects in L2 Spanish (e.g. gatos “cats” vs. definite plurals such as los gatos “the cats”). It tests L2 knowledge of available semantic readings of bare plurals and definite plurals in Spanish, where [+specific] and [+generic] interpretations are syntactically represented differently from English. Assuming L1 transfer, and in view of a potential subset/superset relationship of the two grammars, the learning task in this domain is not a straightforward one. Target acquisition requires both grammatical expansion and retraction; Spanish definite plural subjects require the addition of an L1-unavailable [+generic] reading, while a loss of an L1-available [+generic] reading for preverbal subject bare plurals is required. The results and analysis show that advanced L2 learners of Spanish (English L1) can circumvent a superficial subset/superset learnability problem by means of feature resetting in line with the Nominal Mapping Parameter. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article focuses on the acquisition of copula verbs in Basque by Basque–Spanish bilinguals. Basque and Spanish have two copula verbs: izan and egon and ser and estar, respectively. Basque copulas are similar to their Spanish counterparts in terms of the grammatical contexts in which they are used. However, Basque and Spanish differ in one specific property, the progressive, which is built with izan in Basque. This article assumes the theoretical framework of Zagona for Basque because copula selection can be accounted for by this approach. The present study is the first one to address the issue of the acquisition of copula verbs by Basque–Spanish bilingual children in Basque; we analyze the language used in a storytelling task by 19 Basque-dominant bilinguals compared to that used by 19 child L2 Basque learners, in order to elucidate whether both groups of bilingual children use the copula in a target-like way in Basque. The study shows that no copula choice errors are produced by any of the participants with any predicates. The distribution of the predicates very much resembles the distribution of the predicates in previous studies for Spanish. Adhering to Zagona’s framework, the progressive was included in our study. In this respect, the progressive is used in a target-deviant manner, a finding that can be attributed to crosslinguistic influence. These results are ultimately attributed to children’s parallel knowledge of both interpretable and uninterpretable features, although uninterpretable features seem to be acquired a little earlier. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including bilingualism in children, language acquisition, and Basque language.

This article focuses on the acquisition of verb placement (adverb placement, subject–verb inversion in yes/no questions, subject–verb inversion in direct, indirect and pseudo wh-questions) in L2 Spanish. Four different elicitation tasks (an identification task, a grammaticality judgment task, a preference grammaticality task and a production task) were used for data collection. The subjects were 41 English adult L2 learners of Spanish at different proficiency levels (beginners, low intermediate, intermediate and advanced) according to an independent placement test. In line with Lardiere’s (1998a, 1998b, 2000) and Prévost and White’s (2000) findings, evidence for developments in syntax which is independent of developments in morphology is found in support of the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis. Although L2 learners’ verb-placement is target like at the surface level, their knowledge of verb agreement is poor and limited. That is, L2 learners appear to have reset the verb movement parameter in Spanish (i.e., [+movement]), even though they fail to morphologically mark the verb for person and number correctly, showing lack of knowledge that the inflections in Spanish I are strong. These findings suggest that there is a strong dissociation between syntax and morphology (Lardiere, 2000), but they will also be discussed in the light of some current theories on the acquisition of new values for uninterpretable syntactical features (Hawkins & Hattori, 2006; Tsimpli & Dimitrakopoulou, 2007). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]