The present study connects research on the L2 acquisition of variable structures to the ever-growing body of research on the role of study abroad in the language learning process. The data come from a group of 46 English-speaking learners of Spanish who participated in immersion programs in two distinct locations, Valencia, Spain and San Luis Potosí, Mexico. Simultaneously, we tested a group of native speakers from each region to create an appropriate target model for each learner group. Learners completed a written contextualized questionnaire at the beginning and end of their seven-week stay abroad. Our instrument examines three variable grammatical structures: (1) the copulas

Research on progressive and habitual aspectual marking in Spanish provides a productive test case for second language variation research. In Spanish, two forms can be used to reference ongoing action at speech time (simple present and present progressive) while English predominantly makes use of the present progressive (Torres Cacoullos 2000). Nevertheless, the patterns of use and their acquisition are complex. One key difference for advanced non-natives (as compared to natives) is related to the range of lexical bases (e.g., estar ‘to be,’ andar ‘to walk,’ venir ‘to come,’ etc.) that form the progressive (Fafulas 2015). Additionally, the alternation between the simple present and the progressive is conditioned by a host of linguistic factors, such as lexical aspect, the presence of an adverb, clause type, and animacy, among others (Geeslin & Fafulas 2012). Finally, differences exist between these same two forms cross-linguistically for habitual aspectual marking such that the simple present is more likely to occur in English in habitual contexts than in Spanish and this constitutes another context for these variable forms (Fafulas 2012). Thus, the predictions for English-speaking learners are highly context-dependent. The present study uses a written contextualized task designed to examine patterns of selection across the categories of lexical aspect (e.g., activities, statives, etc.) in combination with the influence that the presence or absence of adverbial phrases may have. We employ a cross-sectional design, collecting data from learners from multiple levels of enrollment, and compare these to native speakers of Spanish and to native speakers of English (tested in English). Our analysis provides an account of the patterns attested in English, in Spanish, and across levels of second language Spanish development.

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These findings emphasize the importance of using language-specific diagnostic materials for nasalance testing, which would be of importance in the treatment of individuals with cleft palate.

In this study we analyze the phenomenon known as “double possession” in monolingual and bilingual Spanish communities located in the Peruvian Amazon. Our data come from sociolinguistic interviews conducted with bilingual Bora-Spanish speakers and monolingual Iquitos Spanish speakers. From a syntactic view, we claim that double possessor constructions in Peruvian Amazonian Spanish arise from small-n incorporation into D, rendering the possessive determiner. We explore the extent to which this movement is motivated by language contact, potentially triggering the remnants of an Old Spanish doubling structure, or an innovation due to the specific contact situation of these communities. Our investigation contributes to theoretical discussions of micro-parametric variation and documents semi-spontaneous speech from a less commonly examined region of the Spanish-speaking world.