The present study explores the subjunctive mood production of 29 heritage speakers (HSs) of Spanish (17 advanced proficiency and 12 intermediate proficiency) and 14 Spanish-dominant controls (SDCs). All participants completed a Contextualized Elicited Production Task (CEPT), which tested their oral production of both lexically-selected (intensional) and contextually-selected (polarity) mood morphology in Spanish. Between-group analyses of the CEPT reveal that the HSs diverge significantly from the SDCs in subjunctive production, specifically by underproducing, overproducing, and avoiding subjunctive mood morphology. Despite these differences, however, the HSs still exhibited sensitivity to mood, producing significantly more subjunctive mood in expected subjunctive contexts than in expected indicative contexts. Based on HSs’ knowledge of the subjunctive, which both resembles and also diverges from that of the SDCs, it is argued that categorizing HSs as having either acquired or not acquired mood in Spanish is descriptively and conceptually problematic.

This study examines three formal linguistic acquisition models of third language (L3) acquisition in the context of Brazilian Portuguese (BP), specifically examining Differential Object Marking (DOM). The main goal is to determine which of the models is best able to predict and explain syntactic transfer in three experimental groups: mirror-image groups of first/second language (L1/L2) English/Spanish bilinguals (i) L1 English/L2 Spanish and (ii) L1 Spanish/L2 English, and (iii) heritage Spanish/English bilinguals. The data provide evidence to support the Typological Primacy Model (Rothman, 2010, 2011, 2013), which predicts Spanish transfer irrespective of its status as an L1, L2 or bilingual first language (2L1). Additionally, the heritage speaker and L1 English group results, taken together, provide evidence for Iverson's (2009) claim that comparing such populations adds independent supportive evidence that the acquisition of linguistic features or properties in an L2 acquired past puberty is not subject to a maturational critical period.

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While early code-switching research (i.e., Poplack, 1980) focused on the possibility of universal constraints on switching, MacSwan's (2010, 2014) "ConstraintFree" research program centers on the notion that code-switching is only constrained by the interaction of a bilingual's two grammars. In following with this proposal, the current study examines whether two types of Spanish-English bilinguals are equally sensitive to the (un)grammaticality of Spanish-English code-switching at the subject-predicate and auxiliary-verb phrase boundaries. Twenty-five heritage Spanish speakers and forty-four L2 Spanish learners completed an Audio Naturalness Judgment Task in which they judged grammatical and ungrammatical Spanish-English code-switching at these two syntactic junctions. Results indicate that the L2 Spanish speakers and the heritage bilinguals, regardless of their self-reported exposure to code-switching, correctly differentiated between grammatical and ungrammatical switches, suggesting that they have implicit knowledge of code-switching grammaticality which falls out from syntactic knowledge of the two languages.

Previous research indicates that heritage speakers (HSs) of Spanish produce both subjunctive and indicative mood in expected subjunctive contexts. The present study sheds new light on this pattern by testing the effects of morphological regularity on HSs’ mood production in volitional contexts, where Spanish‐dominant speakers (e.g., first‐generation immigrants) use almost exclusively subjunctive forms. Results of an elicited production task, completed by 42 HSs and 10 first‐generation controls, reveal that HSs differentiate between the two moods. Despite this sensitivity, HSs also exhibit variability, which is strongly conditioned by regularity. Whereas HSs produce subjunctive forms almost categorically with irregular verbs, their subjunctive production with regular verbs is more variable, a pattern we link to irregular verbs’ higher relative lexical autonomy and perceptual salience. Instead of classifying HSs’ morphological knowledge in binary terms, we argue for the importance of exploring how variability with mood is shaped by the morphological characteristics of individual lexical items.