This paper investigates the extent to which clitic resumption in clitic left dislocation (CLLD) of accusative and dative objects is compulsory in two varieties of Spanish, namely, Peninsular and Rioplatense Spanish. We report the findings of an acceptability judgment task that compares sentences with dislocated direct and indirect objects with and without resumption. The study is motivated by two observations in cases without dislocation. First, in Peninsular Spanish, clitic doubling with dative objects is optional but doubling of accusative objects is very marginal. Second, in Rioplatense Spanish, doubling of accusatives is available under specific conditions. Although the results confirm that resumption in CLLD structures is strongly preferred across varieties and object types, differences between dative vs. accusative clitics are reflected to some extent in CLLD structures in Peninsular Spanish. Concerning cross-dialectal differences between Peninsular vs. Rioplatense Spanish, we propose an account that relies on the availability of null accusative clitics in Rioplatense in contrast to Peninsular Spanish.

Feedback is integral to second language (L2) writing instruction. However, large class sizes and limited teacher time often challenge the delivery of personalized feedback, prompting interest in AI-powered solutions such as ChatGPT (Escalante et al., 2023; Huete-García & Tarp, 2024; Steiss et al., 2024; Yoon et al., 2023; Zhang, 2024). This study evaluates a task-customized GPT model, “Belinda,” trained to assess A1-level Spanish learners’ writing and provide feedback. Two research questions guided the investigation: (1) Can Belinda accurately score beginner Spanish writing using a provided rubric? (2) Can Belinda deliver constructive qualitative feedback? Human and GPT-generated scores were compared for inter- and intrarater reliability, and qualitative analyses categorized the feedback for usability in the classroom. Results revealed moderate alignment between Belinda’s scores and human raters, though reliability of the GPT fell short of calibration benchmarks. Feedback quality varied, with Belinda often providing vague, incomplete, or inaccurate suggestions. Despite iterative training, the GPT struggled to balance error correction with encouragement, a critical need for novice learners. Additionally, inconsistencies in identical GPT versions raised concerns about reliability. While Belinda showed potential in automating feedback, its limitations in accuracy, contextual understanding, and positivity suggest it is not yet a viable substitute for human evaluation by itself. These findings emphasize the challenges of integrating AI into L2 instruction and call for the need for extensive datasets, robust training, and human–AI collaboration to achieve pedagogically sound outcomes. Future research should explore hybrid feedback models and scalable solutions to enhance AI’s role in language education without compromising learner progress or confidence.

Much recent work argues that lexical frequency plays a central explanatory role in linguistic theory, but the status, predicted effects, and methodological treatment of frequency are controversial, especially so in the less-investigated area of syntactic variation. This article addresses these issues in a case study of lexical frequency effects on variable subject personal pronoun (SPP) expression in Spanish. Prior studies of Spanish SPP use revealed significant constraints including formal and semantic properties of the verb, and discourse factors such as a switch reference. These constraints appear to be confirmed in our analysis of 4,916 verbs from a spoken corpus of Spanish, as is a powerful role for lexical frequency. But the frequency effect—best configured as a discrete rather than continuous variable—is complex; statistically, it has no independent direct effect, but operates entirely through interaction with other constraints. All other constraints on SPP use are amplified in high-frequency forms, and some disappear at low frequencies. Frequency thus acts as a ‘gatekeeper’ and potentiator: above some frequency threshold, significant linguistic constraints on SPP use emerge; below the threshold they do not. We propose that this reflects experience and acquisition: speakers cannot formulate hypotheses about individual lexical items until they have sufficient evidence; the threshold is the level at which speakers have enough experience with a form to do so.

These results have important theoretical and methodological implications. They require rich lexical representations incorporating frequency and collocational information. Methodologically they indicate the need for careful quantitative explorations of frequency, because its role as an enabler of other constraints produces unstable statistical results.

This study investigates how stress and metathesis interact in Sevillian Spanish, focusing on how their interaction sheds light on representation. Metathesis affects /s/–voiceless stop sequences, moving a debuccalised coda /s/ to the release of the following stop ( → [patha]). This process plausibly changes syllable structure: the syllable where /s/ originated is closed at one representational level, but open on the surface ([pah.ta] → [pa.tha]). The change in syllable structure could affect weight-sensitive stress, depending on the level speakers refer to in assigning stress. In a stress judgement task, Sevillian listeners treated syllables from which an /s/ had metathesised out similarly to heavy penults and differently from light penults. I outline a range of analyses to account for their behaviour, and suggest that a comprehensive analysis could include gestural representations and separate stress from metathesis, so that phonetic variability in the realisation of metathesis is permitted but does not affect stress.

Word frequency databases like SPALEX and SUBTLEX-ESP treat Spanish as a uniform language, but prior studies and an initial survey (Experiment 1) revealed significant lexical differences between Spanish in Spain and Latin American countries, especially Chile. To establish subjective frequencies of Spanish word usage, an extended survey (Experiment 2) was conducted with Chilean participants, categorizing words by usage area: General, Spain, Chile, and Latin America. Consistent with the initial survey, Chilean participants assigned subjective higher ratings to General and Chilean words. In a lexical decision experiment (Experiment 3), participants responded faster and more accurately to words from these categories. Using survey data, simulations with Multilink+ (Experiment 4) revealed that subjective word ratings better predicted Chilean reaction times than frequencies from existing databases. These findings emphasize the need to address Spanish dialectal differences in research, with word ratings offering a more accurate measure of region-specific lexical nuances than current databases.

The present study uses naturally occurring conversational data from various dialects of Spanish to examine the role of second-person (T/V) reference forms in the accomplishment of social action in interaction. I illustrate how the turn-by-turn progression of talk can occasion shifts in the linguistic means through which speakers refer to their hearers, an interactional commonality between dialects (and possibly languages) that are otherwise pronominally dissimilar. These shifts contribute to the action of an utterance by mobilizing the semantic meaning of a pronominal form in order to recalibrate who the interactants project they are, and who they project they are to one another—not in general, but rather at that particular moment in the ongoing interaction. The analysis posits a distinction between identity status and identity stance to argue in favor of a more microlevel conceptualization of identities and contexts as emergent features of moment-by moment discourse, co-constructed through the deployment of grammatical structure.

Although understanding the role of the environment is central to language acquisition theory, rarely has this been studied for children's phonetic development, and RECEPTIVE and EXPRESSIVE language experiences in the environment are not distinguished. This last distinction may be crucial for child speech production in particular, because production requires coordination of low-level speech-motor planning with high-level linguistic knowledge. In this study, the role of the environment is evaluated in a novel way—by studying phonetic development in a bilingual community undergoing rapid language shift. This sociolinguistic context provides a naturalistic gradient of the AMOUNT of children's exposure to two languages and the RATIO of expressive to receptive experiences. A large-scale child language corpus encompassing over 500 hours of naturalistic South Bolivian Quechua and Spanish speech was efficiently annotated for children's and their caregivers' bilingual language use. These estimates were correlated with children's patterns in a series of speech production tasks. The role of the environment varied by outcome: children's expressive language experience best predicted their performance on a coarticulation-morphology measure, while their receptive experience predicted performance on a lower-level measure of vowel variability. Overall these bilingual exposure effects suggest a pathway for children's role in language change whereby language shift can result in different learning outcomes within a single speech community. Appropriate ways to model language exposure in development are discussed.

In Spanish, the element todo ‘all’ agrees in gender and number with the noun it quantifies over (todas las ventanas ‘all.F.PL the.F.PL windows.F.PL'). In this article I discuss a novel construction in Rioplatense Spanish, restricted to existentials and possessives, in which todo agrees in gender and number with a given nominal in the structure but is neither syntactically nor semantically related to it (e.g. Hay toda agua en el baño (have.PRS all.F.SG water.F.SG in the bathroom) ‘There's water over the whole bathroom floor'). I argue that the syntax and the interpretation of this construction can be explained only if todo ‘all’ is understood to be modifying a silent element (in the sense of Kayne 2004). In particular, I propose that todo is the modifier of a PP headed by the silent preposition WITH, and that the nominal that agrees with todo is the complement of this silent P. This analysis sheds light on the structure of existential sentences and supports the view put forth in Levinson 2011, contra Freeze 1992, that a single underlying structure for possessive structures cannot be maintained.

Erosion of DIFFERENTIAL OBJECT MARKING (DOM)—the overt morphological marking of animate direct objects—has been observed in Spanish heritage speakers who are second-generation immigrants in the United States (Montrul 2004, Montrul & Bowles 2009). We investigated whether DOM is similarly vulnerable in heritage speakers of Hindi and Romanian, two other languages that also exhibit DOM, as well as in first-generation immigrants, adults who are presumably the main source of input to heritage speakers. We report the results of three experimental studies testing acceptability of DOM through a bimodal judgment task in first- and second-generation Spanish, Hindi, and Romanian speakers in the US and native speakers in Mexico, India, and Romania matched for age and socioeconomic status. Our results show structural changes with DOM in all of the heritage speaker groups to different degrees. Acceptance of nontarget DOM omission was more extensive in Spanish than in Hindi and Romanian. First-generation Hindi and Romanian immigrants did not differ in their grammatical proficiency and acceptance of DOM omission from the Hindi and Romanian speakers tested in India and in Romania. However, the first-generation Mexican immigrants displayed similar performance to the Spanish heritage speakers, suggesting that Spanish DOM is prone to L1 attrition in the first generation as well. We discuss linguistic and experiential factors relevant to the three languages and the three immigrant communities to explain these findings.

Variability in the second language (L2) referential choice could be due to lower language proficiency in the L2 or cross-linguistic influence. We compare the L2 English referential choices of bilinguals of typologically different languages (Spanish and English, null subject and non-null subject) to those of bilinguals of typologically similar languages (Dutch and English, both non-null subject and both using pronouns similarly in the target context). Bilinguals’ performance was further compared to that of a group of functional monolingual English speakers. Both bilingual groups were highly proficient, to explore whether high proficiency would attenuate differences with monolinguals. Participants completed a picture-description task eliciting references to antecedents in two-character contexts. Performance was comparable among all three groups in all conditions—evidence that cross-linguistic influence did not play a role for bilingual referential choices. These results thus show that highly proficient bilinguals of both typologically different and similar languages can perform comparably to monolinguals.

This study examines the role of the timing of obligatory disambiguating information – obligatory cues – and presence/absence of optional morphological markers in resolving temporary syntactic ambiguity in Spanish object relative clauses. Native adult comprehension (Study 1) reveals similar accuracy for clauses with relatively early obligatory cues, regardless of the presence/absence of additional markers, and those with late obligatory cues with additional markers, but reduced accuracy for those with late obligatory cues without additional markers. Given the phonetic resemblance of the late-disambiguated variant with its corresponding subject relative, we conduct two follow-up perceptual identification tasks with the whole relative clause, including the head (Study 2), and relative clause fragments (Study 3). The identification tasks show that, when instructed to attend to the form of the structures, participants perceive acoustic differences but retain a bias towards subject-relative interpretations. Our results suggest that additional markers aid comprehension of non-canonical structures when obligatory cues occur relatively late within the structure and highlight the dominance of predictive processing over perceptual information in such cases of late disambiguation.

This paper explores how long-term bilingualism affects the production of intervocalic plosive consonants (/p t k b d ɡ/) in the speech of Afrikaans–Spanish bilinguals from Patagonia, Argentina. We performed sociolinguistic interviews with three speaker groups: L1-Afrikaans/L2-Spanish bilinguals (14 speakers, interviewed separately in Spanish and Afrikaans), L1-Spanish comparison speakers from Patagonia (10 speakers), and L1-Afrikaans comparison speakers from South Africa (11 speakers). We analyzed the speech data using three acoustic measures (constriction duration, relative intensity, and percent voicing) to examine the degree of lenition of the target plosives. The results demonstrate a complex interplay of factors that bring about cross-language influence, which varies based on the target phoneme and phonetic measure. Notably, the findings suggest that phenomena that are gradient phonetic processes in both languages of bilingual speakers (such as the lenition of voiceless plosives in Spanish and Afrikaans) pattern differently than phenomena that are phonological in one language but phonetic in the other (such as lenition of voiced plosives in Spanish versus Afrikaans).