This paper examines the process of acquiring L2s that are closely related to the L1 through data on how adult French speakers learning L2 Spanish in a formal setting develop knowledge and use of past tenses in this L2. We consider the role of transfer and simplification in acquiring mental representations of the L2 grammar, specifically in the area of tense and aspect, and how learners deal with integrating grammatically encoded, lexical and discursive information, including mismatching feature combinations leading to particular inferential effects on interpretation. Data is presented on the Spanish past tenses (simple and compound past, pluperfect, imperfect and progressive forms) from two tasks, an oral production filmretell and a multiple-choice interpretation task, completed by learners at A2, B1, B2 and C1 CEFR levels (N = 20-24 per level). L1 influence is progressively attenuated as proficiency increases. Difficulties were not always due to negative L1 transfer, but related also to grammar-discourse interface issues when integrating linguistic and pragmatic information in the interpretation process. This has clear implications for the teaching of closely related languages: instruction should not only focus on crosslinguistic contrasts, but also prioritize uses requiring complex interface integration, which are harder to process.

In this paper, we present the results of one written task testing the interpretation of mood choice in if-conditional constructions in L2 Spanish: a linguistic task of conditional utterances containing both regular and irregular indicative and subjunctive forms was completed by 48 L1 French and 40 L1 English speakers, and by an L1 Spanish control group (n = 35). Results show a similar pattern in the answers of both experimental groups despite the varying degree of similarity and disparity among the languages. We adopt a cognitive pragmatic perspective for the analysis of the results in connection with the various kinds of effects created by mood alternation in the constructions studied. Furthermore, in relation to current SLA debates (Lardiere 2008, 2009), our findings demonstrate that feature re-assembly in L2 Spanish is not trouble-free, as simple current feature accounts would advocate, even if those features exist in the learners’ L1.

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