The Acquisition of Spanish Morphosyntax: The L1/L2 Connection (Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics)

Recent developments in linguistic theory, as well as the growing body of evidence from languages other than English, provide new opportunities for deeper explorations into how language is represented in the mind of learners. This collection of new empirical studies on the acquisition of Spanish morphosyntax by leading researchers in the field of language acquisition, specifically contributes to the characterization of the L1 / L2 connection in acquisition. Using L1 and L2 Spanish data from children and adults, the authors seek to address the central questions that have occupied developmental psycholinguists in the final decades of the previous century and that will no doubt continue engaging them into the present one. Front Matter....Pages i-xxiii Early Verbs and the Acquisition of Tense Feature in Spanish and Catalan....Pages 1-34 Root Infinitives in Two Pro-Drop Languages....Pages 35-65 Aspects of the Null Object Phenomenon in Child Spanish....Pages 67-88 Spell-Out Conditions for Interpretable Features in L1 and L2/Bilingual Spanish....Pages 89-114 The l2 acquisition of morphosyntactic and semantic properties of the aspectual tenses preterite and imperfect....Pages 115-151 The Second Language Acquisition of Spanish DPS: the Status of Grammatical Features....Pages 153-178 Inalienable Possession in L2 Spanish....Pages 179-208 The Compounding Parameter and the Word-Marker Hypothesis....Pages 209-237 Back Matter....Pages 239-249 This volume evolved from the need to share with colleagues and students in the fields of psycholinguistic and linguistic theory, and with colleagues working in related disciplines, some recent developments in the exploration of the central questions regarding language acquisition, as addressed with Spanish data. "This book is of interest to scholars in linguistics, especially in the field of language acquisition, psycholinguistics, bilingualism, communication, and applied linguistics, and those interested in the structure and acquisition of the romance languages."--Jacket