The present study examines how second language learners (L2) assign the thematic roles of agent/patient in Spanish passive sentences with "ser" (often referred to as the true passive) when it is their initial exposure to this structure. The target sentences were preceded by a contextual sentence. After hearing the two sentences,…

In this exploratory study of subtractive bilingualism in Spanish-English bilingual children, we present evidence that crosslinguistic influence has a selective effect on heritage first language loss. Differences in feature strength between English and Spanish in interrogative and negative polarity item (NPI) sentences seem to affect the…

The first part of a larger planned investigation, this study examines the use of "por" and "para" by nine Peace Corps volunteers in oral interviews at the end of training and roughly one year later, to trace their acquisition over time, in two learning contexts. (24 references) (LB)

Examines the field of Spanish linguistics over 100 years, subdividing Spanish linguistics into several subdisciplines: historical grammar, descriptive phonetics, Spanish phonology, contrastive structures, descriptive grammar, Spanish syntax, specific Spanish dialectology, Spanish in Africa and Asia, sociolinguistics of Spanish-speaking societies,…

Examines the results of a nonce-verb test administered to adults and children in five hispanophone communities to determine their control of the inflectional morphology of the Spanish verbal system. Results indicate that adults have less access to natural productive verbal processes than do children. Notes that these results have implications for…