Sustained interaction between a bilingual's two languages can be a first step toward diachronic language change. We describe two investigations that explore this by examining how bilinguals process innovative syntactic structures in their first language. In the first investigation, a sentence recall/sentence matching task, bilinguals and monolinguals exhibited differences in their tolerance of expressions of induced motion, which vary in acceptability between the two languages (Portuguese and English). In the second investigation, a priming methodology was employed to induce bilinguals to produce in their first language (Spanish) innovative constructions modeled on the second language (English), using materials where the alternation is shared between the two languages (voice, reciprocal) or not (dative). The two investigations provide a window into how languages interact in bilinguals, inducing tolerance of ungrammaticality which, we will argue, could lead to long-term novel representations in the linguistic competence repositories.

This paper presents the Corpus of Written Spanish of L2 and Heritage Speakers (COWS-L2H), a large corpus of compositions written by North American university students learning Spanish. The goals of this work are to (1) build a large corpus of Spanish learner writing that provides samples of written data from Spanish learners in the context of a North American university, (2) to contribute corpus data collected not only from second language (L2) learners of Spanish but also from learners of Spanish as a heritage language (SHL), and (3) to develop one of the few Spanish learner corpora to provide longitudinal data.

This study examines the impact of two topic-related variables (i.e., valence polarity and everyday-life closeness) on the lexical diversity scores (i.e., MTLD) of learners of L2 Spanish at different proficiency levels. The analysis included 3,045 texts written in response to two pairs of prompts by 1,165 students enrolled in an L2 Spanish program. The first pair of prompts asked learners to narrate an event: prompt 1 focused on a perfect vacation (positive event), while prompt 2 asked participants to tell a terrible story (negative event). The second pair asked to describe a person: prompt 1 required that the subject be famous, thus not close to the writer, whereas prompt 2 required that the subject be special and close to the writer. Results indicate that lexical diversity scores were higher for the texts written about the positive event and the famous subject across all proficiency levels.

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