This study examines the second language acquisition of Spanish past tense morphology by three groups of English speakers (beginners, intermediates and advanced). We adopt a novel methodological approach – combining oral corpus data with controlled experimental data – in order to provide new evidence on the validity of the Lexical Aspect Hypothesis (LAH) in L2 Spanish. Data elicited through one comprehension and three oral tasks with varying degrees of experimental control show that the emergence of temporal markings is determined mainly by the dynamic/non-dynamic contrast (whether a verb is a state or an event) as beginner and intermediate speakers use Preterit with event verbs but Imperfect mainly with state verbs. One crucial finding is that although advanced learners use typical Preterit–telic associations in the least controlled oral tasks, as predicted by the LAH, this pattern is often reversed in tasks designed to include non-prototypical (and infrequent) form–meaning contexts. The results of the comprehension task also show that the Preterit-event and Imperfect-state associations observed in the production data determine the interpretation that learners assign to the Preterit and the Imperfect as well. These results show that beginner and intermediate learners treat event verbs (achievements, accomplishments and activities) in Spanish as a single class that they associate with Preterit morphology. We argue that dynamicity contrasts, and not telicity, affect learners’ use of past tense forms during early stages of acquisition.

This article proposes a formal model of the human language faculty that accommodates the possibility of 'attrition' (modification or loss) of morphosyntactic properties in a first language. Modelling L1 performance factors are more immediately perceptible both to attriters themselves and to researchers, whereas the properties of speakers' underlying grammars are typically below the level of consciousness. Moreover, the potential for attrition of morphosyntactic properties beyond childhood appears to be highly restricted and is considerably rarer, as is frequently reported in the literature (see, e.g., reviews in Domínguez 2013; Tsimpli 2017; Schmid and Kӧpke 2017a,b).While stable L1 grammars appear unlikely to be significantly restructured beyond childhood, grammatical attrition-in the sense defined above-is indeed evidenced in the literature, for example in the interpretation of overt pronouns (e.g. Sorace 2000; Tsimpli, Sorace, Heycock and Filiaci 2004; Tsimpli 2007, Domínguez 2013) and properties of pronominal binding (e.g. Gürel 2004Gürel , 2007. While not as widely attested as attrition in L1 performance or processing, we contend that from a scientific perspective, the possibility of grammatical attrition is crucial to our understanding of bilingual acquisition and of the organisation of the language faculty, broadly speaking. However, to our knowledge there is currently no model of grammatical attrition compatible with formal generative models of the language faculty. 3More problematically still, any formal approach to modelling grammatical attrition faces an apparent paradox: if the language faculty architecture comprises mechanisms capable of affecting a mature L1 grammar, then why is the phenomenon of grammatical attrition itself so heavily constrained and so apparently rarely attested? Any model seeking to accommodate attested instances of grammatical attrition will then not only need to account for what may be modified within the L1 grammar (and under what conditions), but will also need to resolve this paradox in modelling attrition.The principal aim of this article is to articulate such a model. Section 2 first establishes a set of requirements which we argue any model of L1 grammatical attrition must meet. We then articulate our own model of L1 grammatical attrition incorporating three key aspects: first, a distinction between input and intake (as input which has been processed and assigned a representation, e.g. Carroll 2001); second, an inference component that modifies an existing grammar under appropriate intake conditions, including parsing and extralinguistic factors such as memory and pattern recognition (e.g. Lidz and Gagliardi 2015); finally, a 'featurebased' generative model of the computational component of the grammar prominent in the theoretical literature (e.g. Chomsky 2000(e.g. Chomsky , 2001. The basis of our model is provided by Lidz and Gagliardi's (2015) L1 acquisition model, as a framework for understanding how input may engender changes to the state of an L1 grammar provided i...

This study presents new empirical evidence on the L2 acquisition of Spanish SV-VS contrasts, a syntax-pragmatics interface phenomenon. Results from a context-dependant preference task involving unergative and unaccusative verbs in different focus situations (broad and narrow focus) reveal that beginner and intermediate English speakers prefer SV in all contexts. In contrast, advanced learners, who clearly know that VS is possible in Spanish, show a pattern of optionality with unergative verbs (in both broad and narrow focus contexts), whereas VS is correctly preferred with unaccusative verbs in both broad and narrowly-focused contexts. We argue that these results can be explained by a representational deficit according to which the VS order is overgeneralized to unergative verbs regardless of the discursive situation. We argue that learners' overuse of VS structures is exacerbated by the lack of clear evidence for the use of SV and VS forms in the native input.

This study investigates the acquisition of the Spanish Imperfect by 60 English learners of Spanish at three different proficiency levels (beginner, intermediate and advanced). Two oral production tasks and one interpretation task show that although the Imperfect is used from early on, the full array of interpretations associated with this form (habitual, continuous and progressive) is not completely acquired even at advanced levels. Learners accept the Imperfect in imperfective contexts but have problems rejecting the Preterit. This problem persists even at advanced levels in continuous contexts. The continuous is conveyed in English by Past Tense, which is used in both perfective and imperfective contexts, whereas in Spanish only the Imperfect is appropriate. We argue that the incorrect low rejection of the Preterit signals a mapping problem of aspectrelated features present in both English and Spanish onto a new form (the Imperfect). These results support the problematic nature of feature reassembly in the acquisition of the Spanish Imperfect by English speakers.

The contribution of Spanish to the field of SLA continues to grow (Lafford & Salaberry 2003; Montrul 2004), and the need for good L2 Spanish datasets is becoming increasingly evident. In this paper we introduce a newly created database titled Spanish Learner Language Oral Corpus (SPLLOC), describing the rationale underlying the database design and methodology used for its construction. This project applying CHILDES tools to L2 Spanish follows successful creation of a collection of French L2 oral corpora (Rule et al. 2003), already available at www.flloc.soton.ac.uk. Creating a successful oral corpus is costly and available corpora are often built somewhat opportunistically from available material rather than designed in a balanced way to facilitate SLA research. The SPLLOC database has been designed to fill the existing gap in Spanish L2 resources and also to support a focused research agenda investigating learner development with respect to the verb phrase, clitic pronouns, and word order, from an interface perspective.