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Demonstratives (this/thatin English) are pivotal in communication. In this study, we show that semantic features of referents systematically influence speakers’ choices of demonstrative forms for Spanish nouns in the absence of a guiding context. We used the Demonstrative Choice Task (DCT), previously applied to two-term demonstrative languages (Danish, English, and Italian), and applied it to Spanish, a three-term demonstrative system (este/ese/aquel), to test if the semantic dimensions driving demonstrative choice overlap with those found for English. 1,639 native Spanish speakers were presented with 480 nouns rated along 76 semantic features and were asked to match each noun with a demonstrative. We found that demonstratives are influenced by the same semantic factors as two-term languages, such as manipulability, valence, and the self. In Spanish, these semantic factors predict the demonstrative choice between the proximaleste/aand a combination of medial and distal formsese/aandaquel/la.Additional semantic factors affect speakers’ preferences forese/aversusaquel/a(e.g., visuality and time). We conclude that many of the semantic attractors influencing the choice of demonstratives are constant across languages, independent of the number of terms characterizing the demonstrative system, and provide a window into the landscape of meaning subserving linguistic reference.

Traditional views on how sex is coded in Spanish nouns are revolutionized in this article. To the initial discovery that sex coding yields not only singlets and doublets but also triplets, it is added that Spanish employs three sex coding modes whose productivity correlates with structural cost. The suppletive and the derivational modes require investing in sex-specific morphemes, which makes them costly, whereas the inflectional mode achieves maximal economy by exploiting the exponent of another grammatical category: declension. The transfer of productive sex coding to the grammar is another major innovation. Lexical Specification is appropriate to formalize the suppletive and the derivational modes, but it is defeated by the intricacies of the inflectional mode, for which a semantic process of Sexualization is introduced. It is further uncovered that syncretism is pervasive and obscures the effects of Sexualization partially or fully. Because sex originates at a deeper level than gender and declension, both of the latter categories can conceal it; hence the common misperception that inflectional sex triplets are doublets or even singlets. The analysis also reveals that plurality facilitates genericity and that inflectional markers are generated from features which, for most words, can be grammatically supplied since they are predictable.

An individual’s sense of the extent to which her or his body physically interacts with objects in the environment (body–object interaction; BOI) has been empirically shown to modulate lexical and semantic processing of object names. To allow for further exploration of the nature of those effects, BOI ratings for 750 Spanish nouns were obtained from 178 young adult participants. Statistical analyses showed moderate correlations between BOI indicators and some psycholinguistic indexes, such as word imageability and age of acquisition. In addition, an exploration of lexical associative relationships revealed that high-BOI words have a consistent tendency to be associated with words naming parts of the body. The ratings could be useful to researchers who are interested in manipulating or controlling for the effects of BOI in their language-processing studies. The complete norms are available for free downloading at Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/kd5vf/).

Successful inclusion of students with learning disabilities in foreign language courses has been problematic, likely due to factors such as heightened anxiety and individualized learning challenges which are characteristic of those with learning disabilities. These learning characteristics often necessitate that multisensory strategies be employed to support students with learning disabilities in academic content areas; prior research has suggested that such strategies contribute to successful completion of foreign language coursework for struggling learners. Accordingly, an initial study investigated the impact of an explicit, multisensory strategy called Guided Visual Vocabulary Practice (GVVP) in recalling English translations of concrete Spanish nouns. Progress of participants (n = 8) with GVVP was compared to performance with traditional flashcards in a single-subject, reversal design spanning a 10-week period. Student performance was assessed by tabulating the number of thematically grouped Spanish nouns correctly translated when presented orally from randomized lists. The findings indicated a moderate effect size (0.54) overall, but the largest impact with GVVP occurred among the three middle school participants included in the sample. An analysis of different aspects of the Spanish vocabulary words (cognates, number of syllables, initial letters) may have correlated with student performance is included, as are implications for future research and instructional practice. Subscribe to LDMJ

The purpose of this article is to substantiate the claim that the semantic feature of homogeneity manifests itself differently in different languages. By contrasting data from Spanish and Danish it is shown that homogeneity is lexically coded in Danish nouns, whereas Spanish nouns are lexically neutral to homogeneity. In Spanish the homogeneity interpretation of nouns is determined when they are inserted into a syntactic structure. The empirical relevance of this assumption is assessed by investigating syntactic and semantic aspects related to the occurrence of bare nominals in object position in the two languages under scrutiny. It is well-known that Spanish as a canonical pattern does not semantically license bare singular nouns with count interpretation (BNs) in object position, viz. #Juan repara coche [Juan repairs car], while in Danish the occurrence of BNs in object position is both possible and normal, viz. Ole maler hus [Ole paints house]. It is argued that this contrast is a predictable consequence of the premise that, in Spanish, transitive activity verbs impose a mass reading on any bare object noun whereas, in Danish, BNs maintain their lexically encoded denotation as inhomogeneous entities. However, contrasting with the leading pattern, the so-called HAVE-verbs (Borthen, 2003) actually license Spanish BNs in object position (cf., e.g., Espinal, 2010; Espinal & Mcnally, 2011), viz. Juan tiene perro [Juan has dog]. It is claimed that the occurrence of BNs in these cases is strongly related to the assumption that HAVE-verbs, contrary to activity verbs, are functionally non-eventive and, therefore, do not impose a specific homogeneity reading on the bare noun in object position.

The choice of theme vowels in Spanish nouns and adjectives can be predicted neither from the phonological shape of roots nor from syntactic features like gender. However, this state of affairs does not require the postulation of inflectional class features. The alternative is for the Spanish lexicon to store stems with their theme vowels, instead of roots annotated with declension diacritics; default generalizations over the lexical entries of stems can be expressed by means of lexical redundancy rules. The hypothesis of stem storage is compatible with the failure of Spanish theme vowels to surface in certain environments: this is demonstrably caused by an entirely general and regular phonological process deleting unaccented stem-final vowels before suffixes beginning with another vowel. Stem storage receives further support from psycholinguistic data from recognition latencies. Additional new evidence comes from cyclic locality conditions on allomorph selection, as shown by an analysis of the well-known stress-driven alternation displayed by items like [kont-á-ɾ] ‘count.inf’ ∼ [kwént-a] ‘count. 3sg’. In derivatives like 〚N 〚V kont-a〛 ðóɾ-∅〛 ‘counter’, assuming that diphthongal allomorphy is a property of the root incorrectly predicts that the choice of allomorph will be determined in the first cycle: i.e. *[kwentaðóɾ]. The locality problem vanishes if /koNt-a/ and /kweNt-a/ are both listed in the lexicon as stem allomorphs. These data show that Stratal Optimality Theory allied to a stem-driven theory of morphology performs better than alternative approaches to allomorphic locality. Root-driven Distributed Morphology is too local: the domains for allomorph selection that it generates are too narrow. Conversely, noncyclic versions of Optimality Theory fail to predict allomorphic locality (even if they can describe its effects) because they endow allomorph selection with unrestricted access to the global environment.

The goal of this study is to describe the acquisition rate for gender acquisition in Spanish and to show whether individual variability and language contact may affect this rate. The participants were intermediate second language Spanish (first language English) learners in the study abroad and at-home contexts over a 4-month period. The participants received grammaticality judgment tests coded for morphological class of the modified noun as well as attributive and predicative adjectives. Data were also collected on social behavior and language contact in Spanish and English in order to explain data outcome. The findings suggest that no difference exists between the two learning contexts and that social behavior and language contact abroad have minimal influence on acquisition rate. Key words: Spanish, individual variability, language contact profile, second language acquisition, Spanish gender agreement, study abroad Introduction Second language (L2) learners who study abroad in an immersion context may or may not show linguistic development. Research has shown that immersion in the target culture is of great value to learners, especially in improving oral production ability (Brecht, Davidson, & Ginsberg, 1993; Collentine, 2004; Freed, Segalowitz, & Dewey, 2004; Isabelli-Garcia, 2003; Kaplan, 1989; Lennon, 1990; Liskin- Gasparro & Urdaneta, 1995; Milleret, 1990; Polanyi, 1995; Segalowitz & Freed, 2004). There are, however, inconsistencies in study abroad research because claims are made based on different acquisition aspects and distinct amounts of time spent abroad. Frequently, claims also lack a comparison to performance in a non-studyabroad context to ensure that the context of learning accounts for linguistic gains or lack of such gains. The present study of learners' linguistic development in the study abroad context provides information about what can be expected from students' performance during one semester and compares the results to those of learners who study in the traditional, at-home context. The scope focuses on gender-agreement development in the interlanguage of Spanish L2 learners that have a first language (L1) of English, a language lacking grammatical gender. Gender-agreement acquisition by these learners can be irregular and not as easily acquired as number agreement. Because number agreement is acquired more easily than gender (Bruhn de Garavito & White, 2002; Dewaele & Veronique, 2001), this study focuses on the more difficult aspect, gender. Examples of gender agreement are listed in (1a) and (1b). FS denotes Feminine Singular, and MP denotes Masculine Plural. (1a) la biblioteca famosa the-FS library-FS famous-FS [the famous library] (1b) los sombreros negros the-MP hat-MP black-MP [the black hats] In (1a), in Spanish, because "library" is feminine, the definite article "the" and adjective "famous" must also be feminine. This is not the case in English, as articles or adjectives possess no gender. In (1b), because the noun sombreros is plural, the definite article los and modifying adjective negros are also plural. Noun form and meaning also affect gender-agreement acquisition. This influence can be seen in example (2) with nouns that are gender-marked by the endings -a and -o. (2a) nouns gender-marked by the -a profesora-FS [professor] (2b) nouns gender-marked by the -o nino-MS [boy] These examples show that the Spanish nouns that are gender-marked by the endings -a and -o are morphologically marked for gender and can serve as a cue for agreement (Finneman, 1992). When L2 learners are unsure of the appropriate morphological marker, they tend to "resort to default gender marking [masculine]" (Bruhn de Garavito& White, 2002, p. 172; see also Harris, 1991) and they tend to overgeneralize the masculine forms more often than they do the feminine ones (Alarcon, 2006; Bartning, 1999; Bruhn de Garavito & White, 2002; Cain, Weber-Olsen, & Smith, 1987; Finneman, 1992; Franceschina, 2001, 2005). …

In this paper we analyze spontaneous and experimental data involving code-mixed DPs made up of English Determiners + Spanish Nouns (the casa “house”) and Spanish Determiners + English Nouns (la [the/feminine] house) from child English/Spanish simultaneous bilinguals and from L1 speakers of English, French and Spanish with different levels of proficiency in their respective L2s (Spanish in the case of L1 English and French; English in the case of L1 Spanish). We show that early child bilinguals and adult simultaneous bilinguals (production data) and L1 speakers of Spanish (experimental data) favor mixings where Spanish provides the functional category, the Determiner, over mixings where English does. We also show that when confronted with these mixed DPs adult L1 Spanish speakers and non-native speakers share a preference for the English D followed by a preference for the default gender marking in Spanish, the masculine (el [the/masculine] house). In the case of the L1 Spanish speakers, this preference is overridden by the “analogical criterion”, (la [the/feminine] house), which consists of assigning the gender of the Spanish translation equivalent (“casa” is feminine) to the English Noun. We provide a linguistic account of these preferences based on the intrinsic Gender feature of the Spanish Noun and the intrinsic Gender Agreement feature or the Spanish Determiner and argue that the cognitive mechanisms employed by the bilingual, the Spanish L1 speaker and the Spanish L2 speaker in spontaneous production and in the grammaticality judgments task make different use of these linguistic units.

Spanish feminine nouns beginning with tonic /a/ are preceded by the definite article el, rather than la, e.g., el agua, el hambre, etc. This el is a diachronic continuation of the Latin feminine demonstrative ĭlla, whose final /a/ merged with the initial tonic /a/ of the nouns concerned, e.g., ĭlla aqua > ela agua > el agua. Thus, from a historical perspective, this el is feminine, and has therefore been known in the scholarly literature as the “feminine el”. However, given that most native speakers of Spanish are unfamiliar with the history of their language, they misinterpret this el to be the masculine definite article used in this context to avoid a perceived cacophonous sequence of two identical vowels. This erroneous reinterpretation of feminine el as masculine has led many speakers to use other masculine modifiers before these feminine nouns, e.g., este agua, poco agua, todo el agua, etc. This use of other masculine modifiers before these nouns has led some scholars to reclassify them as “hermaphroditic”, i.e., half masculine, half feminine, since masculine modifiers can appear before, but only feminine modifiers after. The present study introduces a syntactic criterion, previously overlooked, which intends to resolve the issue.

We present a set of translation norms for 670 English and 760 Spanish nouns, verbs and class ambiguous items that varied in their lexical properties in both languages, collected from 80 bilingual participants. Half of the words in each language received more than a single translation across participants. Cue word frequency and imageability were both negatively correlated with number of translations. Word class predicted number of translations: Nouns had fewer translations than did verbs, which had fewer translations than class-ambiguous items. The translation probability of specific responses was positively correlated with target word frequency and imageability, and with its form overlap with the cue word. Translation choice was modulated by L2 proficiency: Less proficient bilinguals tended to produce lower probability translations than more proficient bilinguals, but only in forward translation, from L1 to L2. These findings highlight the importance of translation ambiguity as a factor influencing bilingual representation and performance. The norms can also provide an important resource to assist researchers in the selection of experimental materials for studies of bilingual and monolingual language performance. These norms may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.

During my internship at a county hospital in southern California, we learned much of our Spanish from patients. My own best teacher was a young woman who was admitted with acute myeloid leukemia, and she taught me considerably more than Spanish nouns and verbs.

The focus of the study is two-fold: (1) to determine how much phonemic material must be considered in predicting nominal gender in Spanish; (2) to determine if gender assignment can be considered an analogical process. A database of Spanish nouns extracted from a frequency dictionary serves as the database for the present study, while the phonemic make up and syllable structure of the penultimate rhyme and final syllable serve as the variables. A number of analogical simulations using the Analogical Modeling of Language algorithm demonstrate that phonemic material from as far back as the penultimate rhyme may aid in gender assignment. Analogy is also shown to closely mirror Spanish speakers' intuitions regarding the gender of unknown words. Gender assignment errors made by children also fall out of the analogical architecture.

This paper focuses on two types of nominal complement clauses, namely finite (el hecho de que vaya 'the fact that s/he goes') and infinitival complements (el hecho de ir 'the fact of going'). The aim is to determine whether the two complement types are "functionally identical" (cf. Bogard & Company 1989). The analysis of two samples of 37 and 56 Portuguese and Spanish nouns, which are frequently combined with both kinds of complement clauses, reveals clear differences between both noun classes and the usage context of the two types of complement clauses. Finite complements are preferred by mental and linguistic nouns, such as certeza 'certainty' and noticia 'news'. These nouns are also associated with the indicative mood in the subordinate clause. The nouns preferring the infinitive, on the other hand, are often modal (e.g. necesidad ), and are associated with the subjunctive mood. Only nouns with mainly factual uses (e.g. facto and hecho 'fact') are frequently combined with both complement types. It is thus concluded that the finite and infinitive clausal complements are not functionally identical. In addition, historically there seems to be a shift towards more finite complements. That is, the infinitival complements are found to predominate in terms of usage frequency in the 16th to 18th centuries, whereas the finite clause complements become increasingly frequent in the 19th and 20th centuries. Original received: 2016/07/29Review sent to author: 2016/10/25Accepted: 2016/10/25

Spanish has left-headed compounds which are not as productive as their left-headed counterparts in other languages. This presence or absence of productivity has been attributed to a binary parameter according to which N-N compounding, as opposed to nominal constructions in which the head noun takes a complement as in the destruction of the city', would be the superset or marked option. Furthermore, the idiosyncratic nature of Spanish N-N compounding has been attributed to the make-up of Spanish Nouns. Specifically, it has been proposed that Spanish Nouns have a word marker' which triggers L1 acquisition of these constructions. Based on the results of two picture tests intended to elicit actual command of N-N compounding strategies, as well as word order patterns and gender marking patterns, we argue that: 1) N-N compounding is not a marked construction; 2) adult L2 acquisition of Spanish N-N compounds is triggered by head directionality (a processing trigger) rather than by the word marker' (a representational trigger) which is supposed to trigger L1 acquisition of these compounds.

Using the variationist comparative method, the status of ambiguous lone Spanish-origin nouns in Catalan discourse is determined by analyzing their distribution and conditioning and by comparing them to their counterparts in unmixed Spanish or in multiple-word code-switches. Some areas of the nominal grammar have been selected for contrastive purposes (determination, complementation, gender, number) because they represent sites of coincidence as well as conflict between the two languages in contact, Spanish and Catalan. The main conclusion of this research is that Spanish-origin nouns in an otherwise Catalan context present grammatical variability similar to that of Catalan nouns, and that they behave differently from Spanish nouns in a monolingual context. In short, the grammar of these nouns is Catalan, and their categorial status is that of loanwords and not that of code-switches.

Virtually no valid materials are available to evaluate confrontation naming in Spanish-English bilingual adults in the U.S. In a recent study, a large group of young Spanish-English bilingual adults were evaluated on An Object and Action Naming Battery (Edmonds & Donovan in Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 55:359-381, 2012). Rasch analyses of the responses resulted in evidence for the content and construct validity of the retained items. However, the scope of that study did not allow for extensive examination of individual item characteristics, group analyses of participants, or the provision of testing and scoring materials or raw data, thereby limiting the ability of researchers to administer the test to Spanish-English bilinguals and to score the items with confidence. In this study, we present the in-depth information described above on the basis of further analyses, including (1) online searchable spreadsheets with extensive empirical (e.g., accuracy and name agreeability) and psycholinguistic item statistics; (2) answer sheets and instructions for scoring and interpreting the responses to the Rasch items; (3) tables of alternative correct responses for English and Spanish; (4) ability strata determined for all naming conditions (English and Spanish nouns and verbs); and (5) comparisons of accuracy across proficiency groups (i.e., Spanish dominant, English dominant, and balanced). These data indicate that the Rasch items from An Object and Action Naming Battery are valid and sensitive for the evaluation of naming in young Spanish-English bilingual adults. Additional information based on participant responses for all of the items on the battery can provide researchers with valuable information to aid in stimulus development and response interpretation for experimental studies in this population.

Although concrete nouns are generally agreed to have shared core conceptual representations across languages in bilinguals, it has been proposed that abstract nouns have separate representations or share fewer semantic components. Conceptual repetition priming methodology was used to evaluate whether translation equivalents of abstract nouns have shared conceptual representations and compare the degree of conceptual overlap for concrete and abstract nouns. Here 72 Spanish-English bilinguals made concrete-abstract decisions on English and Spanish nouns. Both concrete and abstract nouns elicited substantial between-language priming and these effects were of equivalent size, indicating that translation equivalents of both concrete and abstract nouns have shared conceptual representations and that abstract words do not share fewer components. The between-language priming effects and their attenuation relative to within-language priming indicate that the within-language effect is based on facilitation of both word comprehension and semantic decision processes.

Syntactic relationships among non-adjacent words are a core aspect of sentence structure. Research on complex sentences with displaced elements has concluded that resolving long-distance dependencies can tax working memory. Here we examine a simpler relationship—morphological agreement between the elements of a noun phrase—across a gradient of distance. Participants read sentences with violations of gender agreement among Spanish nouns, determiners and adjectives. For those explicitly assigned the task of detecting errors, accuracy was uniformly high across the four levels of distance between (dis)agreeing words. A second group performed a comprehension task as ERPs were recorded. Gender agreement errors elicited a left anterior negativity (LAN) regardless of the distance between (dis)agreeing words, indicating that the errors were detected. In contrast, a temporally later component of the ERP (P600) showed decreasing amplitudes as the number of words between (dis)agreeing elements increased. Smaller P600 responses were also associated with slower responses to the comprehension questions. Given other work suggesting that the P600 indexes attempted repair of a problematic sentence structure, the results suggest that the participants became increasingly unwilling to re-visit their initial parse of a sentence as the required effort increased, despite having noted an error. The results are discussed within the context of studies showing that readers often compute inadequate structural representations of sentences. We suggest that P600 amplitude may reflect the costs versus benefits of sentence re-analysis, determined by a combination of sentence structure, task requirements, and the degree to which sentence meaning hinges on a correct structural analysis.

Much research establishing phonemic bases for grammatical gender assignment in Spanish nouns relies on straightforward word counts, some of them rather small, and does not examine the characteristics of individual words. No distinction is made between native Spanish words and loanwords, or between terminal letter, terminal phoneme, and terminal morpheme. As a result, some useful generalizations are lost, and others, less useful, have been accepted as true and repeated over and over. When large amounts of data are examined in detail, it becomes clear that in many cases noun ending does not serve to establish a significant statistical pattern with respect to gender assignment. However, some very large groups of words share some very productive terminal morphemes, which are invariably masculine or feminine. Sorting out noun ending from terminal morphemes makes it much easier to identify patterns of gender assignment in a system that is otherwise quite random and arbitrary.

Students with Learning Disabilities (LD) frequently struggle to learn and utilize vocabulary in the general education curriculum. The growing requirement that foreign language courses be completed to earn a high school diploma can be both a challenge for LD students and an area to more closely examine strategies to promote student success. Guided Visual Vocabulary Practice (GVVP) has been developed as one approach to helping students with LD more effectively learn concrete Spanish nouns. A demonstration of how to use GVVP for this purpose is provided, along with theoretical underpinnings of the strategy. Further suggestions are also provided for how GVVP may be used in other content areas and in future research.

International audience; This study examined effects of word writing on second language vocabulary learning. In two experiments, English-speaking learners of Spanish attempted to learn 24 Spanish nouns while viewing word–picture pairs. The participants copied 12 target words and wrote nothing for the other 12 target words being studied. Productive vocabulary learning on immediate and delayed (2 days later) measures was higher in the no-writing condition. These findings suggest that this type of forced output without access to meaning can detract from word learning by exhausting processing resources needed to encode novel lexical forms.

In the current study, nine participants were asked to make gender decisions for a set of Spanish nouns while being scanned with functional MRI (fMRI). Words were chosen in which a direct mapping between ending and gender ("transparent" items such as carro(fem) or casa(masc)) is present and those in which there is not a direct relationship ("opaque" items such as fuente(fem) or arroz(masc)). Direct comparisons between opaque and transparent words revealed increased activity in left BA44/45, and BA44/6 as well as bilateral activation near BA 47/insula and the anterior cingulate gyrus. These results reveal activity in areas previously found to be devoted to articulation of the determiner and to morphological processing. Taken together they support the notion that gender decisions for opaque items requires deeper and more effortful processing during the retrieval of lexical and syntactic information.

The present paper constitutes an attempt to establish a delimitation between central and peripheral elements in the category noun in Spanish according to the criterial mentioned as relevant for this distinction by the linguistics of Prague school. Two major aspects are analysed. First, the relational character of the nouns (it is relational the noun which is the nuclear element of an abstract syntactic-semantic pattern which consists of some linguistic variables). In this respect, it may be proved that is a characteristic of the Spanish nouns, unlike verbs, to be no relational. Second, particular attention is paid to the nouns which have a formal-semantic relation with others units of the language system. In our opinion, the nouns which are no relational and/or which are relationed with other unit go away from the centre of this category and they gradually pass (infiltrate) into the peripheral domain of other or others categories.

The vast majority of Spanish nouns form their plural in one of the following three ways: Method Main type of noun Example of plural Add -s Ending in an unstressed vowel Many foreign words ending in a consonant las casas los chalets los shows Add -es Spanish (not foreign) nouns ending in a consonant other than -s Nouns ending in a stressed vowel + -s Many nouns ending in a stressed vowel las flores los ingleses los iranees No change Nouns already ending with an unstressed vowel + -s Families (people or things) las crisis los virus los Blanco los Ford

All nouns in Spanish are either masculine or feminine in gender, except for one or two nouns of undecided gender. There are no Spanish nouns of neuter gender, but there are some neuter pronouns: see Chapter 7.

According to deeply entrenched descriptive and pedagogical traditions, gender is the basic organizing factor in the inflectional morphology of Spanish nouns and adjectives. In ‘The Exponence of Gender in Spanish’ (Harris 1991, hereafter ‘EGS’), I have argued that this tradition is wrong: gender is only one of three interrelated but distinct and autonomous domains relevant to inflection, namely, biological/semantic sex, syntactic gender, and morphological form class. Each of these domains has its own internal organization and its own formal mechanisms. For example, morphological form- class affiliation plays no role in syntactic gender concord, and the single monovalent diacritic mark motivated by gender asymmetries is not formally equivalent to any of the several marks needed to register the assignment of lexical items to form classes.1

Four levels of L2 Spanish learners (n = 115) and a control group of native Spanish speakers (n = 6) indicated their preferred pronunciation for a series of invented Spanish nouns and adjectives. Learners at all levels assigned stress differently to words ending in -icola than to other words ending in a vowel. The same was found to be true for words ending in -en versus those ending in either -an or -on. The observed stress-assignment patterns mirror Aske's (1990) findings for native speakers of Spanish and correspond to actual patterns in the Spanish lexicon. These findings indicate that L1 English learners are sensitive to certain lexical subregularities in L2 Spanish, even from very early on. Furthermore, they suggest that second-language learners use analogy in assigning stress in Spanish, a technique also reported for native speakers.

The effectiveness of the mnemonic keyword method was examined in four experiments with college students learning lists of 24-32 pairs of Spanish nouns and their English equivalents. The first three experiments, in which the lists were presented for periods of free study, yielding the following results: (a) The keyword condition, with keywords supplied by the experimenter, was similar or somewhat inferior to the control conditions both in the SpanishEnglish (forward) and in the English-Spanish (backward) direction; (b) the keyword condition was clearly inferior to controls when students were required to generate keywords; (c) keyword and control conditions were similar in retention over 1 week. In Experiment 4 the keyword method was superior to the control condition with successive, experimenter-paced presentation but inferior with free-study presentation; free study was markedly superior to paced presentation for both keyword and control conditions. Implications for the further study and application of the keyword method, and mnemotechnics more generally, are discussed.

This study sought to determine whether some combination of imitation training and comprehension training was necessary to achieve verbal production or whether comprehension training alone was sufficient to result in verbal production. Fifty-one first- and second-grade subjects were trained to imitate eight words (Spanish nouns) for which there were no referents. An additional set of eight words was trained in a comprehension task where overt verbal rehearsal was prohibited. Once criterion of two successive sessions of 100% performance was reached in training for both imitation and comprehension, training modes were reversed so that items initially trained in imitation were then trained in comprehension andvice versa. Results showed that initial comprehension training did result in some verbal production, whereas initial imitation training, as expected, did not. A marked improvement in verbal production performance was observed when initial comprehension training was followed by imitation training. When initial imitation training was followed by comprehension training, verbal production also resulted but not to the degree or with the consistency of performance which marked the comprehension-then-imitation sequence. Furthermore, comprehension training required more trials to reach a similar level of proficiency when it followed imitation training than when it preceded imitation. These data indicate that initial imitation training interferes with acquisition of subsequent comprehension and production responses and that the preferred training sequence is one which initially focuses on comprehension and follows this with verbal imitation.

An examination was made of the salience of word gender as an encoding dimension. Ss received three Brown-Peterson tests with Spanish nouns, all of the same gender. On Test 4, there was a change in word gender for experimental Ss, and no change for control Ss. A small, but significant, release from PI occurred with gender change. Results were interpreted in terms of Wickens’s (1972) classification of stimulus dimensions.

Since Spanish developed out of the Latin spoken in the Iberian peninsula, foreign elements found their way into the Vulgar Latin spoken there: linguistic practices and usages, Ibero-Celtic words, and borrowings from the Carthaginians, Phoenicians, and Greeks. In the course of its history Spanish has demonstrated an almost unlimited ability to adopt and assimilate foreign elements. During the Arabic rule, Spanish assimilated a great amount of Arabic linguistic material, but at no time did the inhabitants, even in the south, relinquish their Romance tongue. This Vulgar Latin was, and remained throughout the Arabic domination, the language of everyday life; it was spoken in all unofficial dealings, in the market places, and by women and children. Arabic was the language of administration, literature, and of high-class families claiming Arabic descent. This Spanish language of the south (Mozarabic) was quickly accepted in the Visigothic capitals and other large cities; at the same time, however, the Visigothic development of spoken Latin continued. But because of its isolation the Spanish of 'Al-Andalus' relied to a very great extent on Arabic for its new concepts. It was through the Mozarabs, the Spanishspeaking Christians under Moslem rule, that a considerable stock of Arabic words was introduced into Spanish. Since the Arabs were the executors of administrative policies, the leaders in social conventions as well as in commerce and the various industrial enterprises, it is largely from these cultural areas that the Mozarabs borrowed Arabic names and terms which they carefully fitted to Romance standards or norms. In the process of borrowing and assimilation, the existing Spanish was primarily co cerned with the integration of Arabic final consonants, the simplification of difcult consonants and consonant combinations offensive and irreconcilable to Romance. For final consonants only nouns are of decisive importance, since verbs were given purely Romance terminations. We are here concerned only with some of t e most common Spanish nouns which clearly reveal the Arabic article 'al-.' It was the practice in medieval loan-words to take over the Arabic article 'al-' as