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MARCH 01, 2017
ARTICLE
FINANCIAL MARKETS
How Blockchain Is
Changing Finance
by Alex Tapscott and Don Tapscott
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This document is authorized for educator review use only by
Dana Leland, Ottawa University until May 2020. Copying or
posting is an infringement of copyright.
[email protected] or 617.783.7860

FINANCIAL MARKETS
How Blockchain Is
Changing Finance
by Alex Tapscott and Don Tapscott
MARCH 01, 2017
Our global financial system moves trillions of dollars a day and
serves billions of people. But the
system is rife with problems, adding cost through fees and
delays, creating friction through
redundant and onerous paperwork, and opening up opportunities
for fraud and crime. To wit, 45% of
financial intermediaries, such as payment networks, stock
exchanges, and money transfer services,
suffer from economic crime every year; the number is 37% for
the entire economy, and only 20% and
27% for the professional services and technology sectors,
respectively. It’s no small wonder that
regulatory costs continue to climb and remain a top concern for
bankers. This all adds cost, with
consumers ultimately bearing the burden.
2COPYRIGHT © 2017 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL
PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/financial-
services/publications/assets/pwc-gecs-2014-threats-to-the-
financial-services-sector.pdf
https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/financial-
services/publications/assets/pwc-gecs-2014-threats-to-the-
financial-services-sector.pdf
http://www.forbes.com/sites/dinamedland/2015/06/28/cost-of-
regulation-top-concern-for-financial-services/#2238d69078b4
It begs the question: Why is our financial system so inefficient?
First, because it’s antiquated, a
kludge of industrial technologies and paper-based processes
dressed up in a digital wrapper. Second,
because it’s centralized, which makes it resistant to change and
vulnerable to systems failures and
attacks. Third, it’s exclusionary, denying billions of people
access to basic financial tools. Bankers
have largely dodged the sort of creative destruction that, while
messy, is critical to economic vitality
and progress. But the solution to this innovation logjam has
emerged: blockchain.
How Blockchain Works
Here are five basic principles underlying the technology.

1. Distributed Database
Each party on a blockchain has access to the entire database and
its complete history. No
single party controls the data or the information. Every party
can verify the records of its
transaction partners directly, without an intermediary.
2. Peer-to-Peer Transmission
Communication occurs directly between peers instead of
through a central node. Each node
stores and forwards information to all other nodes.
3. Transparency with Pseudonymity
Every transaction and its associated value are visible to anyone
with access to the system. Each
node, or user, on a blockchain has a unique 30-plus-character
alphanumeric address that
identifies it. Users can choose to remain anonymous or provide
proof of their identity to others.
Transactions occur between blockchain addresses.
4. Irreversibility of Records
Once a transaction is entered in the database and the accounts
are updated, the records
cannot be altered, because they’re linked to every transaction
record that came before them
(hence the term “chain”). Various computational algorithms and
approaches are deployed to
ensure that the recording on the database is permanent,
chronologically ordered, and available
to all others on the network.

5. Computational Logic
The digital nature of the ledger means that blockchain
transactions can be tied to
computational logic and in essence programmed. So users can
set up algorithms and rules that
automatically trigger transactions between nodes.
Blockchain was originally developed as the technology behind
cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. A vast,
globally distributed ledger running on millions of devices, it is
capable of recording anything of value.
Money, equities, bonds, titles, deeds, contracts, and virtually all
other kinds of assets can be moved
and stored securely, privately, and from peer to peer, because
trust is established not by powerful
intermediaries like banks and governments, but by network
consensus, cryptography, collaboration,
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and clever code. For the first time in human history, two or
more parties, be they businesses or
individuals who may not even know each other, can forge
agreements, make transactions, and build
value without relying on intermediaries (such as banks, rating
agencies, and government bodies such
as the U.S. Department of State) to verify their identities,
establish trust, or perform the critical
business logic — contracting, clearing, settling, and record-
keeping tasks that are foundational to all
forms of commerce.
Given the promise and peril of such a disruptive technology,
many firms in the financial industry,
from banks and insurers to audit and professional service firms,
are investing in blockchain solutions.
What is driving this deluge of money and interest? Most firms
cite opportunities to reduce friction
and costs. After all, most financial intermediaries themselves
rely on a dizzying, complex, and costly
array of intermediaries to run their own operations. Santander, a
European bank, put the potential
savings at $20 billion a year. Capgemini, a consultancy,
estimates that consumers could save up to
$16 billion in banking and insurance fees each year through
blockchain-based applications.

To be sure, blockchain may enable incumbents such as
JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Credit Suisse,
all of which are currently investing in the technology, to do
more with less, streamline their
businesses, and reduce risk in the process. But while an
opportunistic viewpoint is advantageous and
often necessary, it is rarely sufficient. After all, how do you cut
cost from a business or market whose
structure has fundamentally changed? Here, blockchain is a real
game changer. By reducing
transaction costs among all participants in the economy,
blockchain supports models of peer-to-peer
mass collaboration that could make many of our existing
organizational forms redundant.
For example, consider how new business ventures access growth
capital. Traditionally, companies
target angel investors in the early stages of a new business, and
later look to venture capitalists,
eventually culminating in an initial public offering (IPO) on a
stock exchange. This industry supports
a number of intermediaries, such as investment bankers,
exchange operators, auditors, lawyers, and
crowd-funding platforms (such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo).
Blockchain changes the equation by
enabling companies of any size to raise money in a peer-to-peer
way, through global distributed
share offerings. This new funding mechanism is already
transforming the blockchain industry. In
2016 blockchain companies raised $400 million from traditional
venture investors and nearly $200
million through what we call initial coin offerings (ICO rather
than IPO). These ICOs aren’t just new
cryptocurrencies masquerading as companies. They represent
content and digital rights management
platforms (such as SingularDTV), distributed venture funds

(such as the the DAO, for decentralized
autonomous organization), and even new platforms to make
investing in ICOs and managing digital
assets easy (such as ICONOMI). There is already a deep
pipeline of ICOs this year, such as Cosmos, a
unifying technology that will connect every blockchain in the
world, which is why it’s been dubbed
the “internet of blockchains.” Others are sure to follow suit. In
2017 we expect that blockchain
startups will raise more funds through ICO than any other
means — a historic inflection point.
Incumbents are taking notice. The New York–based venture
capital firm Union Square Ventures
(USV) broadened its investment strategy so that it could buy
ICOs directly. Menlo Park venture
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https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-future-of-financial-
infrastructure-an-ambitious-look-at-how-blockchain-can-
reshape-financial-services
http://www.coindesk.com/santander-blockchain-tech-can-save-
banks-20-billion-a-year/
http://www.coindesk.com/santander-blockchain-tech-can-save-
banks-20-billion-a-year/
https://www.capgemini.com/news/consumers-set-to-save-up-to-
sixteen-billion-dollars-on-banking-and-insurance-fees-thanks-to
https://www.capgemini.com/news/consumers-set-to-save-up-to-
sixteen-billion-dollars-on-banking-and-insurance-fees-thanks-to
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-axoni-blockchain-
idUSKBN149073
https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/12/can-you-trust-crypto-token-
crowdfunding/
crowdfunding/
crowdfunding/
https://singulardtv.com/rights-management
https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/16/the-tao-of-the-dao-or-how-
the-autonomous-corporation-is-already-here/
https://www.iconomi.net/
https://cosmos.network/
https://www.coinbase.com/legal/securities-law-framework.pdf
capital firm Andreessen Horowitz joined USV in investing in
Polychain Capital, a hedge fund that
only buys tokens. Blockchain Capital, one of the industry’s
largest investors, recently announced that
it would be raising money for its new fund by issuing tokens by

ICO, a first for the industry. And, of
course, companies such as Goldman Sachs, NASDAQ, Inc., and
Intercontinental Exchange, the
American holding company that owns the New York Stock
Exchange, which dominate the IPO and
listing business, have been among the largest investors in
blockchain ventures.
As with any radically new business model, ICOs have risks.
There is little to no regulatory oversight.
Due diligence and disclosures can be scant, and some companies
that have issued ICOs have gone
bust. Caveat emptor is the watchword, and many of the early
backers are more punters than funders.
But the genie has been unleashed from the bottle. Done right,
ICOs can not only improve the
efficiency of raising money, lowering the cost of capital for
entrepreneurs and investors, but also
democratize participation in global capital markets.
If the world of venture capital can change radically in one year,
what else can we transform?
Blockchain could upend a number of complex intermediate
functions in the industry: identity and
reputation, moving value (payments and remittances), storing
value (savings), lending and
borrowing (credit), trading value (marketplaces like stock
exchanges), insurance and risk
management, and audit and tax functions.
Is this the end of banking as we know it? That depends on how
incumbents react. Blockchain is not
an existential threat to those who embrace the new technology
paradigm and disrupt from within.
The question is, who in the financial services industry will lead
the revolution? Throughout history,

leaders of old paradigms have struggled to embrace the new.
Why didn’t AT&T launch Skype, or Visa
create Paypal? CNN could have built Twitter, since it is all
about the sound bite. GM or Hertz could
have launched Uber; Marriott could have invented Airbnb. The
unstoppable force of blockchain
technology is barreling down on the infrastructure of modern
finance. As with prior paradigm shifts,
blockchain will create winners and losers. Personally, we would
like the inevitable collision to
transform the old money machine into a prosperity platform for
all.
Alex Tapscott is Founder and CEO of Northwest Passage
Ventures, a consultancy, advisory firm and investor in the
blockchain industry. He is the coauthor of the book, Blockchain
Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin is
Changing Money, Business and the World. Follow him on
Twitter @alextapscott.
Don Tapscott is the bestselling author of Wikinomics, The
Digital Economy, and a dozen other acclaimed books about
technology, business and society. According to Thinkers50, Don
is the 4th most important living management thinker in
the world; he is an adjunct professor at the Rotman School of
Management, and Chancellor of Trent University. He and
his son Alex are co-authors of the book Blockchain Revolution:
How the Technology Behind Bitcoin is Changing Money,
Business, and the World. Follow him on Twitter @dtapscott.
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http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2016/12/09/andreessen-
horowitz-and-union-square-ventures-invest-10-million-in-new-
digital-assets-hedge-fund/#46edeb6a72cd
http://finteknews.com/blockchain-capital-initial-coin-offering/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercontinental_Exchange
http://money.cnn.com/2015/11/02/technology/bitcoin-1-billion-
invested/
https://www.amazon.com/Blockchain-Revolution-Technology-
Changing-Business/dp/1511357665

Understanding
Second language
acquisition
pageThis intentionally left blank
Understanding
Second language
acquisition
Lourdes Ortega
Understanding
Language Series
Series Editors:
Bernard Comrie
and
Greville Corbett
First published 2009 by Hodder Education
Published 2013 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY, 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an

informa business
Copyright © 2009 Lourdes Ortega
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other
means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission
in writing
from the publishers.
The advice and information in this book are believed to be true
and
accurate at the date of going to press, but neither the authors
nor the publisher
can accept any legal responsibility or liability for any errors or
omissions.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of
Congress
ISBN 13: 978-0-340-90559-3 (pbk)
Extracts from The Philosopher’s Demise: Learning French by
Richard Watson
are reprinted by permission of the University of Missouri Press.
Copyright © 1995 by the Curators of the University of
Missouri.

Cover © Mark Oatney/Digital Vision/GettyImages
Typeset in 11/12pt Minion by Phoenix Photosetting, Chatham,
Kent
A mis padres, Andrés y Lourdes, que tan bien me han entendido
siempre en todas
mis lenguas, aunque sólo compartamos una.
To my parents, Andrés and Lourdes, who have always
understood me so well across
my languages, even though we only share one.
Contents
Preface xiii
Tables and figures xvi
1 Introduction 1
1.1 What is SLA? 1
1.2 Whence language? Description, evolution and acquisition 2
1.3 First language acquisition, bilingualism and SLA 3
1.4 Main concepts and terms 5
1.5 Interdisciplinarity in SLA 7
1.6 SLA in the world 7
1.7 About this book 9
1.8 Summary 10
1.9 Annotated suggestions for further reading 10

2 Age 12
2.1 Critical and sensitive periods for the acquisition of human
language 12
2.2 Julie, an exceptionally successful late L2 learner of Arabic
14
2.3 Are children or adults better L2 learners? Questions of rate
16
2.4 Age and L2 morphosyntax: questions of ultimate attainment
17
2.5 Evidence on L2 morphosyntax from cognitive neuroscience
20
2.6 L2 phonology and age 22
2.7 What causes the age effects? Biological and other
explanations 23
2.8 A bilingual turn in SLA thinking about age? 25
2.9 How important is age in L2 acquisition, and (why) does it
matter? 27
2.10 Summary 28
3 Crosslinguistic influences 31
3.1 On L1–L2 differences and similarities 31
3.2 Interlingual identifications 32
3.3 Besides the L1 34
3.4 First language influences vis-à-vis development 34
3.5 Markedness and L1 transfer 37
3.6 Can a cup break? Transferability 38
3.7 Avoidance 39
Contents
3.8 Underuse and overuse 41
3.9 Positive L1 influences on L2 learning rate 42
3.10 First language influence beneath the surface: the case of

information 44
structure
3.11 Crosslinguistic influences across all layers of language 46
3.12 Beyond the L1: crosslinguistic influences across multiple
languages 48
3.13 The limits of crosslinguistic influence 51
3.14 Summary 52
4 The linguistic environment 55
4.1 Wes: ‘I’m never learning, I’m only just listen then talk’ 55
4.2 Acculturation as a predictive explanation for L2 learning
success? 58
4.3 Input for comprehension and for learning 59
4.4 Interaction and negotiation for meaning 60
4.5 Output and syntactic processing during production 62
4.6 Noticing and attention as moderators of affordances in the
environment 63
4.7 Two generations of interaction studies 64
4.8 The empirical link between interaction and acquisition 65
4.9 Output modification 67
4.10 Learner-initiated negotiation of form 69
4.11 Negative feedback during meaning and form negotiation 71
4.12 The limits of the linguistic environment 76
4.13 Summary 79
5 Cognition 82
5.1 Information processing in psychology and SLA 82
5.2 The power of practice: proceduralization and automaticity
84
5.3 An exemplary study of skill acquisition theory in SLA:
DeKeyser (1997) 85
5.4 Long-term memory 87
5.5 Long-term memory and L2 vocabulary knowledge 88

5.6 Working memory 89
5.7 Memory as storage: passive working memory tasks 91
5.8 Memory as dynamic processing: active working memory
tasks 92
5.9 Attention and L2 learning 93
5.10 Learning without intention 94
5.11 Learning without attention 95
5.12 Learning without awareness 96
5.13 Disentangling attention from awareness? 97
5.14 Learning without rules 99
5.15 An exemplary study of symbolic vs associative learning:
Robinson (1997) 100
5.16 An emergentist turn in SLA? 102
5.17 Summary 105
viii
Contents ix
6 Development of learner language 110
6.1 Two approaches to the study of learner language: general
cognitive and 110
formal linguistic
6.2 Interlanguages: more than the sum of target input and first
language 112
6.3 Cognitivist explanations for the development of learner
language 113
6.4 Formula-based learning: the stuff of acquisition 114
6.5 Four interlanguage processes 116
6.6 Interlanguage processes at work: Ge’s da 118
6.7 Development as variability-in-systematicity: The case of
Jorge’s negation 119

6.8 Interlanguage before grammaticalization: the Basic Variety
of naturalistic 121
learners
6.9 Patterned attainment of morphological accuracy: the case of
L2 English 124
morphemes
6.10 More on the development of L2 morphology: concept-
driven emergence 126
of tense and aspect
6.11 Development of syntax: markedness and the acquisition of
L2 relativization 129
6.12 A last example of systematicity: cumulative sequences of
word order 130
6.13 Fossilization, or when L2 development comes to a stop
(but does it?) 133
6.14 What is the value of grammar instruction? The question of
the interface 136
6.15 Instruction, development and learner readiness 138
6.16 Advantages of grammar instruction: accuracy and rate of
learning 139
6.17 The future of interlanguage? 140
6.18 Summary 141
7 Foreign language aptitude 145
7.1 The correlational approach to cognition, conation and affect
in 146
psychology and SLA
7.2 Learning and not learning French: Kaplan vs Watson 147
7.3 Language aptitude, all mighty? 148
7.4 Aptitude as prediction of formal L2 learning rate: the MLAT
149

7.5 Is L2 aptitude different from intelligence and first language
ability? 151
7.6 Lack of L2 aptitude, or general language-related
difficulties? 152
7.7 Memory capacity as a privileged component of L2 aptitude
154
7.8 The contributions of memory to aptitude, complexified 156
7.9 Aptitude and age 158
7.10 Does L2 aptitude matter under explicit and implicit
learning conditions? 159
7.11 Most recent developments: multidimensional aptitude 161
7.12 Playing it to one’s strengths: the future of L2 aptitude? 163
7.13 Summary 164
8 Motivation 168
8.1 The traditional approach: the AMTB and motivational
quantity 168
8.2 Integrativeness as an antecedent of motivation 170
Contents
8.3 Other antecedents: orientations and attitudes 171
8.4 First signs of renewal: self-determination theory and
intrinsic motivation 175
8.5 Motivation from a distance: EFL learners’ orientations and
attitudes 178
8.6 Language learning motivation: possible in situations of
conflict? 181
8.7 Dynamic motivation: time, context, behaviour 183
8.8 Looking forward: the L2 Motivational Self System 185
8.9 Behold the power of motivation 188
8.10 Summary 189

9 Affect and other individual differences 192
9.1 Personality and L2 learning 193
9.2 Extraversion and speaking styles 196
9.3 Learner orientation to communication and accuracy 198
9.4 Foreign language anxiety 200
9.5 Willingness to communicate and L2 contact 202
9.6 Cognitive styles, field independence and field sensitivity
205
9.7 Learning style profiles 206
9.8 Learning strategies 208
9.9 The future promise of an all-encompassing framework: self-
regulation 211
theory
9.10 Summary 212
10 Social dimensions of L2 learning 216
10.1 The unbearable ineluctability of the social context 217
10.2 Cognition is social: Vygotskian sociocultural theory in
SLA 218
10.3 Self-regulation and language mediation 219
10.4 Some findings about inner, private, and social speech in L2
learning 221
10.5 Social learning in the Zone of Proximal Development 224
10.6 Negative feedback reconceptualized 225
10.7 Interaction is social: Conversation Analysis and SLA 227
10.8 The CA perspective in a nutshell 228
10.9 Some contributions of CA-for-SLA 229
10.10 Learning in CA-for-SLA? 232
10.11 Grammar is social: Systemic Functional Linguistics 233
10.12 Learning how to mean in an L2 234
10.13 Language learning is social learning: language
socialization theory 236
10.14 The process of language socialization: access and

participation 237
10.15 The outcomes: what is learned through L2 socialization?
239
10.16 Sense of self is social: identity theory 241
10.17 L2 learners’ identity and power struggles: examples from
circumstantial 243
L2 learning
10.18 Close impact of identities on L2 learning: examples from
elective 245
L2 learning
x
Contents xi
10.19 Technology-mediated communication as a site for socially
rich L2 248
learning
10.20 Never just about language 250
10.21 Summary 251
References 255
Author index 290
Subject index 296

Preface
Writing a graduate-level introduction to SLA has been a
challenge and, like all
challenges, both a curse and a blessing in the effort. Perhaps
part of the difficulty
comes from the fact that I have always looked at textbooks with
suspicion.
Textbooks constitute an attempt to enshrine the official story of
a discipline because
they are, as Kuhn (1962/1996, p. 137) noted, ‘pedagogic
vehicles for the
perpetuation of normal’ disciplinary knowledge. In so doing,
they can become
unwitting tools for the inclusion and exclusion of what counts
as validated work,
and they portray disciplines as frozen in time and space. Good
textbook authors
also seek to tell an interesting story to their readers, and good
stories always
demand rhetorical sacrifices. Some of the rough edges of a
discipline, the
ambiguous trends, the less ‘tellable’ details, must be shunned
for the sake of
coherence and linearity, and a big story rather than a collection
of ‘small stories’
(Georgakopoulou, 2006) must be produced. Good stories also
tell as much about the
narrator as they do about an event or a discipline. Textbooks
are, therefore, one-
sided views of any field, even when at first blush they may
come across as perfectly
innocent compendiums of available-to-all, neutral knowledge. I
was painfully
aware of these dangers as I wrote this textbook, although I

cannot honestly say that
this awareness has helped me avoid the pitfalls.
Another difficulty that made this challenge exciting but
agonizing, and one that I
only discovered as I put myself to the task, is that there is a
certain schizophrenia in
writing for an imagined audience of students (the real
consumers of textbooks)
while still feeling the usual presence of one’s research
community (the audience I
was accustomed to addressing as a writer of research articles).
Namely, what might
appeal to and benefit our students versus our fellow researchers
can be radically
different. Thus, not only the language, but also the content,
must be thoroughly
calculated when writing a textbook. My strategy for dealing
with this challenge was
to constantly ask myself: What would my students benefit from
hearing about this
topic? How can I make the material more engaging, the story
more palatable? How
can I make my passion for studying L2 learning contagious to
them? I also drew
upon the frequent questions, comments, reactions, complaints
and amazements
that my students have shared with me over a full decade of
teaching SLA during
each and every semester of my career thus far. I have had the
good fortune of
teaching these courses across four different institutional
cultures, and this has
afforded me a special kind of cosmopolitan view of the world of
SLA that I truly owe
to my students’ intelligence, enthusiasm and candour. Their

names are too many to
Preface
mention, their faces all spread across the geography of the
United States that I have
travelled. But all of them have been a strong presence as I
wrote. I do not know if I
have succeeded in writing this book for my students before my
colleagues, but I can
honestly say I have tried my best to do so.
I owe a debt of gratitude to many people who have supported
me in this project.
It has been a privilege to work with the Understanding
Language Series editors,
Bernard Comrie and Greville Corbett, whose astute comments
and unflagging
enthusiasm benefited me chapter after chapter. Norbert Schmitt
suggested my
name to them when they thought of adding a volume about SLA
to the series, and
so this opportunity would not have come my way without his
initiative. At Hodder
Education, the professionalism, kindness and savvy author
psychology of Tamsin
Smith and Bianca Knights (and Eva Martínez, initially) have
been instrumental in
helping me forward as I completed the project. Two of my
students, Sang-Ki Lee
and Castle Sinicrope, kindly volunteered their time to help me
with comments and
with tedious editorial and bibliographical details when it was
much needed.

A number of colleagues lent their time and expertise generously
when I asked
them to read chapters of the book: Zoltán Dörnyei, Scott Jarvis,
Alison Mackey,
Sandra McKay, Carmen Muñoz and Richard Schmidt. Each of
them took the
request seriously and provided supportive and critical feedback
that I have tried to
incorporate. During the spring of 2008, Linda Harklau (at the
University of
Georgia) and Mark Sawyer (at Temple University in Japan) used
a prepublication
manuscript of the book in their courses, and so did Robert Bley-
Vroman and myself
in two sections of SLA at the University of Hawai‘i. I am most
grateful to Linda,
Mark and Robert (and their students and mine) for the faith they
showed in the
book. Knowing how diverse their disciplinary interests are,
their positive reactions
gave me confidence that the textbook would be friendly for use
in very different
contexts, and this was an important goal I had set for myself. I
cannot thank enough
Mark Sawyer, in particular, who became a most knowledgeable
and engaged
interlocutor during the last months of drafting and redrafting,
emailing me his
detailed feedback on each chapter after reading it with his
students in Japan. Many
conversations with Kathryn Davis, Nina Spada (during an
unforgettable summer
spent at the University of Toronto) and Heidi Byrnes have also
found their ways
into small decisions along the writing process. Michael Long, as

always, is to be
thanked for his faith in me and for his generous mentorship.
How I wish Craig Chaudron, my friend, mentor and colleague,
could have been
here too, to support me as he had so many times before with his
meticulous and
caring feedback, his historical wisdom and his intellectual
rigour. His absence was
always felt as I was writing this book, locating and leafing
through volumes from the
huge SLA library that I have inherited from him with much
sadness. I thank Lucía
Aranda for many mornings of yoga and many moments of
teaching me fortitude,
giving me encouragement and keeping me sane. John Norris
stood by me with his
usual hard-to-find thoughtfulness, uncompromising intellect and
warm heart. He
was and is a vital source of inspiration and strength.
With such rich help from so many experts and friends, one
would think all the
imperfections and flaws that arose as the project unfolded
would have been caught
xiv
Preface xv
along the way, and surely amended by the end of the process.
Much to the contrary,
I am cognisant of a number of shortcomings, all of which are
my exclusive

responsibility. In the end, if nothing else, the experience of
writing a textbook – this
textbook – has humbled me, has renewed my passion for SLA in
all its forms and
has reminded me that in the making of a discipline, as in life,
we should not take
anything for granted. I have dedicated this book to my parents,
who have never
taken for granted my life- and language-changing decisions.
They have always
given me the two gifts of unconditional love and deep
understanding.
Lourdes Ortega
South Rim of the Grand Canyon
7 July 2008
Tables and figures
Table 2.1 Critical and sensitive periods in animal learning,
based on Knudsen (2004)
Table 2.2 L2 morphosyntactic knowledge along the age of onset
continuum
Table 2.3 Differences between near-native and native
morphosyntactic knowledge
Table 4.1 Four early L2 recast studies
Table 5.1 Memory tasks and benchmarks in the study of storage
memory capacity
Table 5.2 How can awareness versus automatic attention be
measured in SLA studies?
Table 6.1 Nora’s use of ‘How do you do dese’ over a school
year
Table 6.2 Jorge’s development of English negation

Table 6.3 The Basic Variety summarized (based on Perdue,
1982; Klein and Perdue, 1997)
Table 6.4 Morpheme accuracy order, from earliest to latest
mastery
Table 6.5 Three broad developmental phases in the expression
of temporality
Table 6.6 Stages in the development of perfective (pretérito)
and imperfective
(imperfecto) aspect in L2 Spanish
Table 6.7 Relative clauses in L2 German following Keenan and
Comrie’s (1977) Noun
Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy
Table 6.8 The emergence of word order in L2 German according
to Meisel et al. (1981)
Table 6.9 The emergence of questions in L2 English according
to Pienemann et al. (1988)
Table 7.1 Design of the MLAT
Table 8.1 Watson vs Kaplan on three dimensions of motivation
Table 8.2 Main antecedents investigated in L2 motivation
research
Table 8.3 The L2 Motivational Self System according to Csizér
and Dörnyei (2005b)
Table 9.1 Affect and L2 learning
Table 9.2 Three models of personality employed in SLA
research
Table 9.3 Six of the ten dimensions in the Ehrman and Leaver
(2003) Learning Style
Model
Table 9.4 Self-Regulatory Capacity in Vocabulary Learning
Scale illustrated (Teng et al.,
2006)

Figure 6.1 The two L2s by two L1s design of the ESF project
(adapted from Perdue, 1982,
p. 47)
Introduction
Language is one of the most uniquely human capacities that our
species possesses,
and one that is involved in all others, including consciousness,
sociality and culture.
We employ the symbolic system of language to make meaning
and communicate with
other fellow humans. We mean and communicate about
immediate realities as well
as about imagined and remembered worlds, about factual events
as well as about
intentions and desires. Through a repertoire of language
choices, we can directly or
indirectly make visible (or purposefully hide) our stance,
judgement and emotions
both towards the messages that we communicate and towards
the addressees of those
messages. In characteristically human behaviour, we use
language not only to
communicate to specific audiences, but sometimes to address
ourselves rather than
others, as in self-talk, and other times to address collective,
unknown audiences, as
when we participate in political speeches, religious sermons,
internet navigation,
commercial advertisements, newspaper columns or literary
works.
We take it for granted that all humans have the potential to

accomplish all of these
amazing feats in whatever language(s) they happen to grow up
with. But many
people around the globe also do many of the same things in a
language other than
their own. In fact, whether we grow up with one, two or several
languages, in most
cases we will learn additional languages later in life. Many
people will learn at least
a few words and phrases in a foreign language. Many others will
be forced by life
circumstances to learn enough of the additional language to
fend for themselves in
selected matters of daily survival, compulsory education or job-
related
communication. Others still will choose to develop entire
communication
repertoires and use literary or scientific discourses comfortably
and with authority
in their second language or languages. Indeed, many people
around the globe may
learn, forget and even relearn a number of languages that are
not their mother
tongue over the course of their late childhood, adolescence and
adulthood. The
details of people’s L2 learning histories can vary greatly,
depending on where their
studies, their families, their jobs and careers, and wider
economic and political
world events, take them. How do humans learn languages after
they learn their first?
This is the fundamental question that we will explore in this
book.
1.1 WHAT IS SLA?

Second language acquisition (SLA, for short) is the scholarly
field of inquiry that
investigates the human capacity to learn languages other than
the first, during late
1
2 Introduction
childhood, adolescence or adulthood, and once the first
language or languages have
been acquired. It studies a wide variety of complex influences
and phenomena that
contribute to the puzzling range of possible outcomes when
learning an additional
language in a variety of contexts. SLA began in the late 1960s
as an emerging
interdisciplinary enterprise that borrowed equally from the
feeder fields of
language teaching, linguistics, child language acquisition and
psychology
(Huebner, 1998). During the 1980s and 1990s SLA expanded
considerably in scope
and methodology, to the point that by the end of the twentieth
century, after some
40 years of exponential growth, it had finally reached its
coming of age as an
autonomous discipline (Larsen-Freeman, 2000). The growth of
SLA continues to be
prodigious today. This book is about SLA, its findings and
theories, its research
paradigms and its questions for the future.
In this first chapter I have three goals. First, I situate SLA in

the wider landscape
of the language sciences and introduce readers to the aims and
scope of this field. I
then present definitions of the main terms I will use throughout
the text. Finally, I
explain the rationale for the rest of the book.
1.2 WHENCE LANGUAGE? DESCRIPTION, EVOLUTION
AND ACQUISITION
How can language as a human faculty be explained? This
fundamental question
guides a number of language fields that pursue three kinds of
understanding about
language: descriptive, evolutionary and developmental.
A number of disciplines within the language sciences aim to
provide an accurate
and complete description of language at all its levels, such as
sounds (phonetics
and phonology), minimal grammatical signs (morphology),
sentences (syntax),
meanings (semantics), texts (discourse analysis) and language
in use
(sociolinguistics, pragmatics). The overarching question guiding
these subfields of
linguistics is: What is language made of, and how does it work?
Human language
manifests itself in spoken, signed and written systems across
more than 6,500
languages documented to date (they are catalogued in
Ethnologue; see Gordon,
2005). Despite this daunting linguistic variety, however, all
languages, no matter
how different from each other they may seem (Arabic from
American Sign

Language from Chinese from English from Spanish from
Swahili), share
fundamental commonalities, a universal core of very abstract
properties. Thus,
linguistics and its various subfields aim at generating
satisfactory descriptions of
each manifestation of human language and they also seek to
describe the universal
common denominators that all human languages share.
A different approach to explaining language as a human faculty
is to ask not what
or how, but whence and why questions: Whence in the evolution
of the human
species did language originate and why? This is the line of
inquiry pursued in the
study of language evolution, which focuses on the phylogenesis
or origins of
language. A fundamental area of research for cognitive
scientists who study
language evolution (and a source of disagreement among them)
is whether human
language evolved out of animal communication in an
evolutionary continuum or
First language acquisition, bilingualism and SLA 3
whether the two are fundamentally different biological
capacities (Bickerton, 2007;
Tallerman, 2005). It is well known that other animal species are
capable of using
elaborate systems of communication to go about collective
matters of survival,
nutrition and reproduction. The cases of species as different as

bees, dolphins and
prairie dogs are well researched. However, none of these
species has created a
symbolic system of communication that even minimally
approaches the
complexity and versatility of human language. Chimpanzees,
however, possess a
genetic structure that overlaps 99 per cent with that of Homo
Sapiens. Although
they do not have a larynx that is fit for human language or
hands that could be
physically modulated for signing, some of these animals have
been taught how to
communicate with humans through a rudimentary gesture-based
language and
through computer keyboards. Bonobos, if reared by humans, as
was the case of
bonobo celebrity Kanzi, can achieve the comprehension levels
of a two-and-a-half-
year-old human and develop human-like lexical knowledge (Lyn
and Savage-
Rumbaugh, 2000). The conclusion that apes can develop true
syntactic knowledge
remains considerably more controversial, however. As you can
guess, language
evolution is a fascinating area that has the potential to
illuminate the most
fundamental questions about language.
For a full understanding of the human language faculty, we also
need to engage
in a third line of inquiry, namely the study of the ontogenesis of
language: How does
the human capacity to make meaning through language emerge
and deploy in each
individual of our species? This is the realm of three fields that

focus on language
acquisition of different kinds.
1.3 FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION, BILINGUALISM AND
SLA
In some parts of our world, most children grow up speaking one
language only. It
should be underscored that this case is truly the minority in the
large picture of
humanity, although it is the norm in many Western middle-class
contexts. Perhaps
because many researchers also come from these same contexts,
this is the type of
language acquisition that has been studied the best (for a good
review, see
Karmiloff-Smith and Karmiloff-Smith, 2001). The field that
investigates these cases
of monolingual language acquisition is known by the generic
name of child
language acquisition or first language acquisition. A robust
empirical research
base tells us that, for children who grow up monolingually, the
bulk of language is
acquired between 18 months and three to four years of age.
Child language
acquisition happens in a predictable pattern, broadly speaking.
First, between the
womb and the few first months of life, infants attune themselves
to the prosodic
and phonological makeup of the language to which they are
exposed and they also
learn the dynamics of turn taking. During their first year of life
they learn to handle
one-word utterances. During the second year, two-word
utterances and

exponential vocabulary growth occur. The third year of life is
characterized by
syntactic and morphological deployment. Some more
pragmatically or
syntactically subtle phenomena are learned by five or six years
of age. After that
Introduction
point, many more aspects of mature language use are tackled
when children are
taught how to read and write in school. And as children grow
older and their life
circumstances diversify, different adolescents and adults will
embark on very
different kinds of literacy practice and use language for widely
differing needs, to
the point that neat landmarks of acquisition cannot be
demarcated any more.
Instead, variability and choice are the most interesting and
challenging linguistic
phenomena to be explained at those later ages. But the process
of acquiring
language is essentially completed by all healthy children by age
four of life, in terms
of most abstract syntax, and by age five or six for most other
‘basics’ of language.
In many parts of the globe, most children grow up speaking two
or more
languages simultaneously. These cases are in fact the majority
in our species. We
use the term ‘bilingual acquisition’ or ‘multilingual acquisition’
to refer to the

process of learning two or more languages relatively
simultaneously during early
childhood – that is, before the age of four. The field that studies
these
developmental phenomena is bilingualism (or multilingualism,
if several rather
than two languages are learned during childhood). Two key
questions of interest
are how the two (or more) languages are represented in the
brain and how bilingual
speakers switch and alternate between their two (or more)
languages, depending
on a range of …
The Facilitative Role of L1
Influence in Tense–Aspect Marking:
A Comparison of Hispanophone
and Anglophone Learners of French
JESÚS IZQUIERDO1
Universidad Juárez Autónoma de Tabasco
Licenciatura en Idiomas
División Académica de Educación y Artes
Francisco Sarabia # 3
Jalpa de Méndez, Tabasco
C.P. 86200
México
Email: [email protected]
LAURA COLLINS
Concordia University
TESL Centre, Department of Education
1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. West
Montreal, Quebec, H3G 1M8
Canada

English learners of French whose first language (L1) does not
mark the perfective/imperfective
distinction have shown verb semantic influence and an overall
preference for perfective over
imperfective in their use of second language (L2) tense–aspect
markers. This study investi-
gated whether learners whose L1 marks the
perfective/imperfective distinction would exhibit
similar acquisition profiles. Hispanophones (n = 17) and
Anglophones (n = 15) at simi-
lar levels of French L2 proficiency completed a 68-item cloze
task with equal numbers of
perfective and imperfective contexts distributed across 4
semantic categories: stative, activity,
accomplishment, and achievements. In a 20-minute
retrospective interview, a subsample of
the participants (8 Hispanophones, 11 Anglophones) commented
on factors influencing their
tense–aspect choices. An ANOVA of 1,012 predicates revealed
that unlike the Anglophones, the
Hispanophones did not prefer perfective over imperfective, and
they were also less influenced
by verb semantics. The learners’ comments suggest that the
Hispanophones made effective
use of L1–L2 similarities, whereas the Anglophones appealed to
verb semantics and partially
understood pedagogical rules, which were frequently associated
with inappropriate uses of the
forms.
English speaker: We don’t make such a distinc-
tion in English, so I didn’t know
whether, here, in French one
would say il y avait [imperfec-
tive] or il y a eu [perfective].

Spanish speaker: Here, I used il y a eu [perfective],
because, here, in Spanish we say
1Correspondence to the first author should be mailed to: Jesús
Izquierdo, Francisco Sarabia # 3, Jalpa de Méndez, Tabasco,
C.P. 86200, México.
The Modern Language Journal, 92, iii, (2008)
0026-7902/08/350–368 $1.50/0
C©2008 The Modern Language Journal
. . . hubo [perfective]; we would
not say . . . habı́a [imperfective].
These comments were made by two adult sec-
ond language (L2) learners of French of similar
overall proficiency who had been asked to com-
ment on the tense–aspect forms they had pro-
duced during a controlled production task. The
passé composé (perfective) and imparfait (imper-
fective) distinction addressed in the comments
is a well-documented challenge for learners
of French, but the Spanish speaker (i.e., His-
panophone) reports that recourse to his first lan-
guage (L1), in which the perfective/imperfective
distinction also exists, influenced his choice of
what was ultimately the correct tense–aspect
form for the context. The English speaker (i.e.,
浦原喜助�
浦原喜助�

Jesús Izquierdo and Laura Collins 351
Anglophone), however, reports that the absence
of such a distinction in his L1 made it difficult to
choose between the two forms.
Studies of tense–aspect acquisition have pro-
vided cross-linguistic evidence in support of com-
mon patterns of development among L2 learn-
ers, with respect to the influence of verb se-
mantics and narrative grounding on the use
of temporal morphology. There is also evi-
dence that these influences can be mediated
by knowledge of previously learned languages
(Salaberry, 2005). To date, most research has
focussed on the negative effects of L1 influ-
ence (Collins, 2002, 2004; Housen, 2000; Kihl-
stedt, 2002). The degree to which L1–L2 simi-
larities may also facilitate acquisition—potentially
providing a rate or route advantage, or both—
is not well documented, however. This study
was designed to address this issue, through an
investigation of the acquisition of the perfec-
tive/imperfective in French by Hispanophones
and Anglophones.
BACKGROUND
The Acquisition of L2 Temporal Morphology
in French
Learners of French need to acquire different
sets of morphological markers to contrast not
only tense but also grammatical aspect. The for-

mer points to the time when an action occurs
(e.g., present, past, future), whereas the latter
renders the manner in which this action takes
place (e.g., habitual, progressive, completed; see
Comrie, 1976, 1985; Klein, 1994). Both sentences
in Example 1 refer to the past action of plant-
ing strawberries, but they differ in the perspective
taken on the past event.
EXAMPLE 1
French Perfective and Imperfective Marking
1(a) Pendant l’été, j’ai planté des fraises
‘During the summer, I planted [perfective]
strawberries.’
1(b) Pendant l’été, je plantais des fraises
‘During the summer, I planted [imperfec-
tive] strawberries.’
In French, the perfective is marked with the
passé composé 1 and renders the completeness of
a past event (Howard, 2002; Kihlstedt, 2002). In
Example 1(a), the action of planting strawberries
is described as an event that was fully achieved
in the past. The imperfective is marked with the
imparfait and may express habit, duration, itera-
tion, or progression in the past tense2 and thus,
in Example 1(b), the use of the imperfective with
the predicate presents the planting of strawber-
ries as taking place either habitually or repeatedly
during a past period of time.
Among L2-instructed learners of French, two
consistent findings with respect to the acquisition

of these past tense forms are (a) that they are
acquired at different rates (with the perfective
emerging before the imperfective) and (b) that
they are distributed differently across verb types.
The perfective emerges with dynamic predicates
(e.g., tomber ‘to fall,’ nager un kilomètre ‘to swim a
kilometre,’ manger ‘to eat’), and the imperfective
with a limited set of statives, namely être ‘to be’ and
avoir ‘to have’ in particular, along with aimer ‘to
like,’ vouloir ‘to want,’ and pouvoir ‘to be able to’
(Ayoun, 2001, 2004; Bardovi-Harlig & Bergström,
1996; Harley, 1992; Harley & Swain, 1978; Kaplan,
1987; Salaberry, 1998).
Studies conducted in the content-based Cana-
dian French immersion programmes have shown
that young learners who achieved impressive lev-
els of communicative competence in their L2 may
still operate with a simplified past tense mark-
ing system (Harley, 1992; Harley & Swain, 1978),
which is characterised by use of the perfective
with dynamic verbs, even in obligatory contexts
for imperfective, and a more restricted use of im-
perfective with statives. Adult learners in different
types of French L2 programmes have also shown a
preference for using the perfective with dynamic
predicates that have an inherent end (e.g., telics,
such as nager un kilomètre ‘to swim a kilometre’
and tomber ‘to fall’) and the imperfective with
states and dynamic situations (activities) that do
not have an inherent end (e.g., atelics, such as
manger à la maison ‘to eat at home,’ regarder la télé
‘to watch TV’) (Ayoun, 2005; Bardovi-Harlig &
Bergström, 1996; Clemance, 2004; Howard, 2001,
2002; Salaberry, 1998).

These patterns of past tense marking are con-
sistent with the predictions of the aspect hypoth-
esis (Andersen, 2002; Andersen & Shirai, 1994),
according to which the acquisition of perfective
and imperfective marking is influenced by se-
mantic properties inherent in verbal predicates
(i.e., lexical aspect). These semantic properties
are dynamicity, telicity, and punctuality. Dynamic
situations require energy; telic situations have an
inherent endpoint; and punctual situations are
perceived to occur instantaneously3 (Ayoun & Sal-
aberry, 2005; Bardovi-Harlig, 2000; Salaberry &
Shirai, 2002).
According to the aspect hypothesis, similarities
between the semantic properties of verbs and the
functions of tense–aspect markers lead learners to
浦原喜助�
352 The Modern Language Journal 92 (2008)
associate some verbs with specific temporal mor-
phology. A verbal predicate such as fermer la porte
‘to close the door,’ which is telic and punctual,
is a strong candidate for perfective marking but
a very weak candidate for imperfective morphol-
ogy because the action of closing the door needs
to reach completion in order to occur. Perfective
marking is used to indicate the completeness of an
event and results in the generation of sentences
such as j’ai fermé la porte ‘I closed [perfective] the
door.’ However, learners also need to learn that a

different form is required when telic events are ha-
bitual, repeated, or incomplete: je fermais la porte
‘I closed [imperfective] the door.’
The aspect hypothesis makes three predictions
about learner acquisition of the perfective and the
imperfective: (a) Learners will acquire the perfec-
tive before the imperfective; (b) they will prefer
to use the perfective with telic verbs (i.e., verbs
of achievement, e.g., tomber ‘to fall’; fermer ‘to
close’; and verbs of accomplishment, e.g., nager
un kilomètre ‘to swim a kilometre,’ aller à l’école ‘to
go to school’), a preference that then spreads to
atelic dynamic verbs (i.e., verbs of activity; marcher
dans la forêt ‘to walk in the woods,’ manger à la
maison ‘to eat at home’) and, finally, to atelic non-
dynamic verbs (i.e., verbs of states: être ‘to be,’
aimer ‘to like’); and (c) then they will acquire
the imperfective first with states and then activi-
ties, accomplishments, and achievements. In this
study, we examined the degree to which these pre-
dictions held when the learners’ L1 marked the
imperfective/perfective distinction.
L1 Influence and the Acquisition of Temporal
Morphology
In all of the research previously reviewed, the
participants were Anglophone learners of French.
Unlike French, English does not grammaticalise
the distinction between perfective and imper-
fective aspects; most of the functional values of
the French imperfective, along with that of the
French perfective, can be rendered in English by
the simple past, as in the sentence “During the
summer, I planted strawberries.” In order to differ-

entiate between a single instance or multiple oc-
currences of the action in this sentence, one needs
knowledge of the context, of adverbials, or of the
use of the optional habitual aspect markers used
to or would . In French, this difference is clearly
established through temporal morphology (i.e.,
grammatical aspect), as illustrated in Example 1.
The progressive value of the French imperfective
is rendered in English by the past progressive, but
there are times when even this function can be
expressed through the simple past as well. For ex-
ample, the sentences “I hit my head as I fell down
the stairs” and “I hit my head as I was falling down
the stairs” can both express a progressive mean-
ing. (For further discussion, see Ayoun, 2005; Cle-
mance, 2004.) This similarity between the English
past progressive and the progressive value of the
French imperfective appears to mislead learners,
causing them to restrict the use of the French im-
perfective to its progressive use at the expense of
its other values (Ayoun, 2004, 2005; Harley, 1992).
Research has shown that L1 influence can affect
the acquisition of temporal morphology. Collins
(2002) pointed out that among French learners
of English, use of the present perfect (a com-
pound construction similar in form but not in
function to the French passé composé ) competed
with use of the simple past when the learners
worked with telic verbs, a tendency that was not ob-
served among learners of mixed L1 backgrounds,
virtually all of whom spoke languages in which the
compound form does not exist (Bardovi-Harlig &
Reynolds, 1995). This finding was corroborated
by a cross-sectional comparison of Japanese- and

French-speaking learners’ use of the English sim-
ple past. In this comparison, the Francophones’
inappropriate use of the present perfect in con-
texts that were obligatory for the simple past re-
sulted in a significant difference between the two
L1 groups in the category of telic achievement
verbs (Collins, 2004).
In a longitudinal study of the development of
tense–aspect marking of a Dutch learner of En-
glish, Housen (2000) concluded that L1–L2 dif-
ferences may increase a learner’s reliance on the
temporality inherent in the meaning of verbs.
Dutch learners need to acquire the distinction
between the simple past and the past progressive
in English because this distinction is not marked
in their L1. Housen found that his participant’s
use of the past progressive and the simple past for
regular verbs was in line with the inherent tem-
porality of the verbs, but her use of the simple
past for irregular verbs was not. Housen argued
that this finding was the result of the learner’s re-
liance on the temporality in the meaning of the
verbs in cases where she needed to function on
a rule-based system for tense–aspect marking, but
not when she needed to work with irregular verbs
that she had already acquired.
There is also evidence that L1 influence may
continue to affect the use of the functional val-
ues of temporal morphology among more pro-
ficient L2 learners. Kihlstedt (2002) found that
advanced Swedish learners of French, whose L1
does not mark grammatical aspect, differed from

浦原喜助�
浦原喜助�
French native speakers in the functional use of
tense–aspect marking in nonprototypical contexts
for tense–aspect forms, such as using the imparfait
with telics and the passé composé with states.
In light of the impact that L1–L2 differences
can have on the acquisition of L2 features, one
question that arises is whether the learning of
the perfective/imperfective distinction in an L2
is facilitated when the learner’s L1 already marks
the forms. Spanish, like French, marks the perfec-
tive and imperfective distinction, as illustrated in
Example 2.
EXAMPLE 2
Spanish Perfective and Imperfective Marking
2(a) Durante el verano, sembré fresas.
‘During the summer, I planted [perfective]
strawberries.’
2(b) Durante el verano, sembraba fresas.
‘During the summer, I planted [imperfec-
tive] strawberries.’
The expression of termination or complete-
ness of an event (the passé composé in French)

is rendered in Spanish through the pretérito.4 The
imperfective verbal morphology of French and
Spanish also is similar in that it may express ha-
bituality, duration, and frequency. In Spanish, the
progressive value of the French imperfective can
be rendered through the pasado progresivo (see De
Lorenzo Roselló, 2001; Salaberry, 2000, 2005).
The facilitative role of L1 influence on the
acquisition of L2 temporal morphology has not
received much research attention, but some re-
searchers have hypothesised a potential benefit to
learners when there are L1–L2 or L2–L3 similar-
ities in tense–aspect forms (De Lorenzo Roselló,
2001; Kihlstedt, 2002; Salaberry, 2005). This bene-
fit would be consistent with evidence from studies
on the acquisition of other features that indi-
cate that the L1 can have a facilitative effect
on the acquisition of an L2 (Kleinmann, 1977;
Laufer & Eliasson, 1993; Sabourin, 2001; Zobl,
1980a, 1980b, 1982). Sabourin, for instance, in-
vestigated the ability of learners from various L1
backgrounds to deal with gender agreement be-
tween determiners and nouns in Dutch. The find-
ings showed greater accuracy in gender marking
among learners whose L1 was similar to Dutch
in terms of noun gender and determiner–noun
phrase gender agreement than among learners
whose L1 was not similar to Dutch.
RESEARCH QUESTION AND HYPOTHESES
The research question addressed in this
study was how the existence of the perfective/
imperfective aspectual distinction in the L1 would

benefit the acquisition of these forms in an L2.
Two hypotheses were entertained, one related
to the distribution of perfective and imperfec-
tive markers overall and one related to the use
of tense–aspect markers in the more challenging
nonprototypical contexts. Both hypotheses com-
pared English-speaking learners of French with
Spanish-speaking learners of French at the same
level of L2 proficiency as follows.
Hypothesis 1: The Spanish-speaking learners of
French will not show a preference
for perfective over imperfective
marking.
Hypothesis 2: The Spanish-speaking learners will
be less influenced by lexical aspect
in the use of perfective and imper-
fective markers than the English-
speaking learners.
METHODOLOGY
Participants
A total of 77 young adult low-intermediate
learners of French volunteered for the present
study. The Anglophones (n = 46) were enrolled in
French classes at a university in Montreal and the
Hispanophones (n = 31) were attending French
classes at the university level in southeast Mex-
ico. To control for potential differences in access
to the target language (i.e., L2 context in French
Canada, French foreign language context in Mex-
ico) that could influence the performance of the
learners in the testing tasks (Howard, 2001; Light-

bown, 1985), 32 English L1 and 28 Spanish L1
participants were selected by matching linguistic
and biographical profile data. This information
was elicited through a questionnaire and informal
interviews about access to the target language out-
side the classroom. The participants were similar
in age (ranging from 19 to 21 years), in their use
of French outside the classroom,5 in the number
of French study hours outside the classroom (be-
tween 0 and 2 hours), and in the amount of time
learning French prior to their current course (an
average of 18 months). None of the participants
reported having previously learned another Ro-
mance language or having studied French in a
French-dominant context.
Instrument and Procedures
In some studies of temporal morphology, the
participants have been grouped according to
overall knowledge of the tense–aspect marker
浦原喜助�
354 The Modern Language Journal 92 (2008)
under investigation, and the subsequent analyses
focussed on how this knowledge was distributed
across the variables of interest (i.e., verb types or
narrative grounding; e.g., Bardovi-Harlig, 1998;
Bardovi-Harlig & Bergström, 1996; Collins, 2002,
2004). In this study, because the research question
focussed on the use of two tense–aspect markers

and the hypotheses predicted greater appropriate
use for one of two L1 groups with the forms, it was
important to equate the groups on overall level of
L2 proficiency.
Proficiency Test (Grouping Instrument). The pro-
ficiency test was developed to place learners into
one of six levels at one of the participating
universities.6 For each level, there is a 10-
minute interview followed by a 15-minute, 35-
item multiple-choice test covering a range of
forms (tenses, articles, gender agreement, etc.)
in French. The participants in the present study
completed the Level-III test, which is described
by the institution as low intermediate. Only those
participants whose scores fell within the institu-
tional range for the low-intermediate level (60–
90%) were retained for the study. There were 17
Spanish L1 learners and 15 English L1 learners.7 A
t -test found no significant differences between the
Spanish L1 group (M = 76.6%, SD = 10.1) and the
English L1 group (M = 76.6%, SD = 6.6), t (30) =
.022, p = .98. Results from the oral interviews
showed that all the participants were able to
communicate using the past, present, and future
tenses.
Tense–Aspect Test (Data Elicitation Instrument 1).
Following the design of previous tense–aspect
studies, a cloze passage test was developed (e.g.,
Bardovi-Harlig & Reynolds, 1995; Collins, 2002).
Two sample passages appear in the Appendix.
This type of elicitation instrument allows for con-
trol over the numbers of verbal categories and
obligatory contexts for the perfective and imper-
fective aspects. In order to elicit spontaneous use

of tense–aspect marking from the learners, re-
sponse choices were not provided.
The test included an equal number of obliga-
tory perfective and imperfective contexts (28 for
each) and 18 distractors (contexts for other
tense–aspect forms) distributed across 20 pas-
sages. Each of the activity, accomplishment, and
achievement verb types included five target verbs,
which were required once in the perfective con-
text and once in the imperfective context. There
were six stative verbs (five statives were required
twice and one stative was required three times in
the perfective and imperfective contexts in the
passage). Because some scholars have hypothe-
sised that the frequency of statives in the input
may play a role in the use of temporal morphol-
ogy (Ayoun, 2004; Harley, 1989; Harley & Swain,
1978), the selection of verbs other than être and
avoir was based on their frequency of use in an
online corpus, with a total of 1,110,392 words,
taken from the French newspaper Le Monde (The
Compleat Lexical Tutor, French section: http://
132.208.224.131/concordancers/). Out of 15 sta-
tives used in the corpus, the following statives
with the highest frequency profiles were selected:
penser ‘to think’ (269 imperfective cases in the
corpus), sembler ‘to seem’ (43 imperfective cases),
and appartenir ‘to belong’ and sentir ‘to feel’ (8
imperfective cases each). Our earliest test was
first piloted with nine university-educated Franco-
phones (aged 28–50 years) who also spoke English
and Spanish. Items yielding less than 90% agree-
ment on the required grammatical aspect (perfec-
tive or imperfective) were excluded from the test.

The new version was piloted a second time with a
different group of five Francophones who were in
100% agreement for all target items.8 Following
Collins’s (2002) cross-sectional study design, two
counterbalanced versions of the revised test were
created (the same items were presented in reverse
order).
Cloze Passage Data Coding and Analyses. Fol-
lowing the methods used in Bardovi-Harlig and
Bergström’s (1996) study, each test was scored for
the appropriate use of the perfective and the im-
perfective. Instances where the learners used an
inappropriate auxiliary to build the compound
form of the perfective were considered appropri-
ate attempts at the perfective (e.g., ∗il a retourné
à la maison ‘he + incorrect auxiliary choice +
returned to the house’ instead of the accurate
form il est retourné à la maison ‘he + correct aux-
iliary choice + returned to the house’). Similarly,
errors in agreement between the imperfective in-
flection and the head noun phrase also were ig-
nored (e.g., ∗les édifices tombait ‘the buildings + fall
with wrong imperfective inflection’ instead of les
édifices tombaient ‘the buildings + fall with correct
imperfective inflection’).
To ensure coding reliability, appropriate at-
tempts at perfective and imperfective markers
were coded twice by the same rater. In cases where
differences between the first and the second cod-
ing were found (10 items out of the 1,012 target
items that were coded), a native speaker of French
recoded the tests, and the differences were re-
solved through discussion.

Reorganisation of the Target Items. The verbs ap-
partenir ‘to belong’ and être ‘to be’ elicited a high
number of nonresponses from both L1 groups.
During the interviews, some Anglophones indi-
cated that they did not understand the verb ap-
partenir or its context; other Anglophones did not
know which auxiliary to use, avoir or être . Two His-
panophones did not use the verb appartenir in any
of the contexts where it was required. Our Franco-
phone reviewers indicated, during the interrating
process, that in one perfective context for être ,
the sentence also would have been correct in the
imperfective but would have rendered a different
meaning. There was a second perfective context
with être in which the Anglophones did not sup-
ply temporal morphology. In this case, it was not
possible to determine the reason. We therefore
discarded appartenir from the statistical analyses
and retained only two instances of être (once in
an imperfective context and once in a perfec-
tive context), reducing the target items in the
test from 56 to 50. As a consequence, five stative
verbs were considered for the statistical analyses,
each of which had the same number of obligatory
contexts for the perfective as for the imperfec-
tive: être (one item each tense), avoir (two items
each tense), penser (two items each tense), sembler
(three items each tense), and sentir (two items
each tense).
Data Collection Instrument 2 (Retrospective In-
terview). Retrospective interviews are an impor-

tant elicitation instrument in L2 research because
they can contribute to our understanding of the
processes that underpin L2 acquisition (Gass &
Mackey, 2000). For example, interviews follow-
ing an oral narrative task allowed Liskin-Gasparro
(2000) to identify factors associated with tense–
aspect choices among advanced Spanish L2 learn-
ers. Collins (2005) showed that stimulated recall
(where the participants were shown a selection
of their responses on a timed computerized task)
provided insights into the mental representations
learners hold with respect to L2 tense–aspect
marking and the input variables that potentially
influence its development. In order to minimize
validity problems inherent in self-report method-
ology (notably the fading from memory of the
thoughts that guided the original performance),
it is important to conduct the interviews as soon
as the task is completed (Ericsson & Simon, 1993)
and to provide cues from the participants’ perfor-
mance on the task (Egi, 2004; Taylor & Dionne,
2000). Accordingly, the subset of learners who
agreed to be interviewed (8 Hispanophones and
11 Anglophones) for the present study met with
the first author for 20 minutes immediately after
completing the cloze test. The interviews focussed
on the learners’ choice of temporal morphology
for the same 13 tokens, all of which required non-
prototypical marking (see Appendix). To stimu-
late their recall, the learners were shown the target
passages they had responded to and were asked
to comment on their thinking during the task.
The interviews were conducted in the L1 of the
learners.

RESULTS: CLOZE TEST
This section presents the results of the two-way
mixed between–within subjects analyses of vari-
ance (L1 group between; tense–aspect within)
on both the overall and the appropriate use of
tense–aspect markers in the cloze test. Overall use
represents the percentage of the perfective or im-
perfective across all tokens in the test, whereas
appropriate use represents the percentage of the
perfective and imperfective in obligatory con-
texts.
Main and interaction effects are reported in
line with the hypotheses of the study; when a
significant interaction was found, simple main
effects were tested using Bonferroni probabil-
ity adjustments for multiple comparisons. Effect
size is reported as Hedges’s d (Hedges & Olkin,
1985), calculated as the difference between the
two group means divided by the pooled within-
group variance of the two groups, whose result is
then multiplied by an adjustment factor for small
samples: 1 − (3/(4N − 9)).
Hypothesis 1: Rate of Perfective
and Imperfective Marking
The statistical analyses of the overall use of
tense–aspect markers in the cloze test yielded a sig-
nificant interaction effect between L1 and gram-
matical aspect, F (1, 30) = 4696.7, p = .01. Simple
main effect contrasts within groups revealed a sig-
nificant mean difference between the use of the
perfective (M = 57.4%, SD = 6.49) and the imper-
fective (M = 40.3%, SD = 6.9, p = .01, d = 2.53)

within the Anglophone group, but not for the
mean difference between the use of the perfec-
tive (M = 47.7%, SD = 8.41) and the imperfective
(M = 47.7%, SD = 6.9) within the Hispanophone
group. Simple main effect contrasts for groups
within each level of grammatical aspect revealed
significant differences, in the use of both perfec-
tive marking (Anglophone group: M = 57.4%,
SD = 6.49; Hispanophone group: M = 47.7%,
SD = 8.41, p = .01, d = −1.25) and imperfective
356 The …
International Journal of Bilingualism
17(1) 71 –96
© The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permission:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1367006911432619
Ijb.sagepub.com
Crosslinguistic influence at the
syntax proper: Interrogative
subject–verb inversion in
heritage Spanish
Alejandro Cuza
Purdue University, USA

Abstract
This study examines the potential effects of crosslinguistic
influence in the acquisition of subject–
verb inversion in Spanish matrix and embedded wh-questions
among Spanish heritage language
learners living in the United States. The results from an
acceptability judgment task and a written
production task administered to 17 US-born heritage speakers
indicate crosslinguistic influence
effects. The effects are more evident with embedded
interrogatives than with matrix questions.
A follow-up study with the heritage speakers also shows less
inversion behavior with embedded
questions in oral production but higher performance levels than
in written production. The
findings are discussed in relation to interface vulnerability
approaches and current debates on the
selective nature of crosslinguistic influence in L2 and bilingual
development.
Keywords
crosslinguistic influence, interface hypothesis, Spanish heritage
speakers, subject–verb inversion
Introduction
Previous research in second (L2) and bilingual language
acquisition has long debated whether
crosslinguistic influence might be selective. Some early
research from the 1980s and 1990s
observed that the lexicon and morphology (i.e. subject–verb
agreement and gender) were highly
vulnerable to transfer effects, while syntactic domains were less
problematic (e.g. Håkansson,
1995; Lambert & Freed, 1982). More recently, Sorace et al.
have reexamined this issue from a

generative grammar framework (e.g. Sorace, 2000, 2004, 2005).
They suggest that linguistic
properties in which the syntax interfaces with external domains,
such as pragmatics (syntax–
discourse interface and external interfaces), are inherently more
complex and, therefore, more
permeable to emerging optionality (divergence from target first
language (L1) forms) among
immigrants undergoing L1 attrition and to residual optionality
(divergence from target L2 forms)
among near-native L2 learners.1 In contrast, purely syntactic
features or syntax–semantic
interface structures are hypothesized to be resistant to L2
influence. This is known as the Interface
Corresponding author:
Alejandro Cuza, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, School
of Languages and Cultures, Purdue University, Stanley
Coulter Hall, 640 Oval Drive, West Lafayette 47907, IN, USA.
17110.1177/1367006911432619CuzaInternational Journal of
Bilingualism
2012
Article
浦原喜助�
72 International Journal of Bilingualism 17(1)
Hypothesis (e.g. Serratrice, Sorace, & Paoli, 2004; Sorace,
2005; Tsimpli & Sorace, 2006; Tsimpli,
Sorace, Heycock, & Filiaci, 2004).

The syntax–discourse interface encompasses structures that
require the integration of both syn-
tactic and discourse-pragmatic knowledge, such as the
production and distribution of subject pro-
nouns in Spanish and Italian. It integrates interpretative
components associated with the logical-form
(LF) level of syntactic representations (discourse-pragmatic
knowledge) with core syntactic opera-
tions in the computational system (Argyri & Sorace, 2007, p.
79). The general argument is that
areas where different grammatical modules interact are more
difficult to acquire since this is where
crosslinguistic influence is more likely to occur. The syntax
proper (i.e. syntactic properties of
subjects in Spanish) may be well established but
pragmatic/discourse requirements (when to use an
overt subject in Spanish) will show persistent problems. This
proposal has been recently extended
to instances of incomplete acquisition among heritage language
learners in the United States. It is
hypothesized that incomplete acquisition at interfaces might be
more pronounced (e.g. Montrul,
2009). Incomplete acquisition refers to the interruption of
native language development in early
childhood due to reduced input and intense exposure with a
dominant language (e.g. Montrul,
2004, 2008). Heritage language learners are second- or third-
generation immigrants who were
raised in a home environment where a heritage language was
spoken in addition to the majority
language (e.g. Montrul, 2004; Potowski, Jegerski, & Morgan-
Short, 2009; Silva-Corvalán, 1994).
In most cases, they acquire productive and receptive skills in
the heritage language at home but do
not receive formal instruction until later in life in high school

or university.
The objective of this study is to examine the interface
hypothesis further and specifically its
claim that the syntax proper is spared from crosslinguistic
influence and consequent variability. I
draw on previous research in L2 and child bilingual acquisition
to present and discuss new data on
the acceptability and production (written and oral) of subject–
verb inversion in matrix and embed-
ded wh-questions in Spanish. Interrogative subject–verb
inversion is obligatory in non-Caribbean
Spanish. In both matrix and embedded argument wh-questions,
the main verb must always appear
before the subject, as represented in (1a) and (1b) below:
(1)a. ¿Qué compró María? (matrix wh-question)
what bought María
What did Mary buy?
b. Me pregunto qué compró María (embedded wh-question)
me wonder what bought María
I wonder what Mary bought
This grammatical area is a good testing ground on which to
examine the supposedly unproblematic
nature of narrow syntax because it is a syntactic phenomenon
not driven by pragmatic/discourse
factors (for similar argument for subject–verb inversion in
Greek wh-questions, see Argyri &
Sorace, 2007). The study therefore examines (a) the extent to
which heritage language learners

have difficulty with subject–verb inversion in both types of wh-
questions; and if so (2) whether
these difficulties can be accounted for in terms of
crosslinguistic influence (e.g. Jarvis & Pavlenko,
2008; Pérez-Leroux, Cuza, & Thomas, 2011). If narrow
syntactic properties are unproblematic, as
浦原喜助�
浦原喜助�
Cuza 73
proposed by interface vulnerability accounts, heritage language
learners are predicted not to show
difficulties with subject–verb inversion in Spanish. Since this
syntactic operation has little prag-
matic or discourse implications, it should be resistant to
crosslinguistic influence and potential
variability. Target acquisition and maintenance would be
expected. However, English-dominant
heritage speakers of Spanish may also show difficulties with
interrogative inversion in Spanish due
to crosslinguistic influence of different options in English (no
inversion) and reduced access to
relevant input in the Spanish-developing grammar.
It could be assumed that subject–verb inversion in wh-questions
is intrinsically discourse linked
because the complementizer system expresses force
distinguishing declaratives from interroga-
tives, and as such, it determines the discourse properties of the

sentence (e.g. Rizzi, 1999). However,
this does not mean that subject–verb inversion in Spanish
interrogatives is licensed by discourse
factors in the same sense of what seems to be operational in
Sorace’s line of research (e.g. purely
discourse-oriented phenomena like distribution of overt subjects
in Italian). Although the comple-
mentizer system expresses force in distinguishing clause types,
lexical verb movement in Spanish
wh-questions is fully syntactic as opposed to interface driven.
This is a syntactically motivated
phenomenon, although with natural discourse motivations (e.g.
getting more information on a
topic, showing interest in a conversation, and indicating doubt
or uncertainty).
The study is structured as follows: Section ‘The issue of
transfer selectivity’ examines previ-
ous research regarding the role of transfer among bilingual
speakers. Section ‘Subject–verb inver-
sion in Spanish interrogatives’ presents the syntactic framework
adopted in this study, learnability
implications, research questions, and the hypotheses of this
study. Section ‘Study 1’ presents
study 1, followed by the results and discussion. Section ‘Study
2’ presents and discusses the
results of study 2, a follow-up study testing the oral production
of subject–verb inversion among
the heritage speakers.
The issue of transfer selectivity
Some previous research
The role of crosslinguistic influence and language interaction in
bilingual development is an area

of research that has sparked a great deal of interest among
researchers over the last five decades.
Since the seminal work of Weinreich (1953), researchers in the
fields of L2 acquisition (e.g.
Coppieters, 1987; Gass & Selinker, 1992; Jarvis & Pavlenko,
2008; Liceras, 1989; Montrul &
Slabakova, 2003; Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996) and L1
attrition/incomplete acquisition (e.g. Köpke,
2004; Montrul, 2002, 2004, 2009; Pavlenko, 2000; Rothman,
2009b; Schmid, 2002; Silva-
Corvalán, 1994) have been interested not only in examining
what gets transferred but also, more
importantly, in how the process works. Specifically, researchers
have investigated the role of con-
flating variables in the extent of transfer including the
typological complexity of the two languages
(e.g. Müller & Hulk, 2001; Sánchez, 2003; Yip & Matthews,
2009), the role of age of onset of
bilingualism (e.g. Bylund, 2009; Montrul, 2008; White &
Genesee, 1996), and the effect of lan-
guage dominance in the directionality and frequency of
transferred elements (e.g. Kim, Montrul, &
Yoon, 2010; Liceras & Díaz, 1998).
With respect to structural complexity, early research
documented differences in the permeabil-
ity of some areas but not others, a discussion that has stirred a
great deal of controversy to this day
(e.g. Andersen, 1982; Håkansson, 1995). For example, Andersen
(1982) suggested, based on per-
sonal observation of the language development of his children
and other subjects, that quick
retrieval of lexical items and idiomatic phrasing in ongoing
speech production is much more

浦原喜助�
affected by transfer than morphosyntactic or phonological
features. Moreover, he argues that com-
plex areas of the grammar or “weak points” that took much
longer to acquire should be the hardest
to maintain and consequently lost first. The selective nature of
transfer and the extent to which
different linguistic subsystems are affected was also examined
by Håkansson (1995). The author
investigated whether some areas of the grammar, such as syntax
and morphology, are more affected
by crosslinguistic influence than other areas. The results from
composition tests administered to
five bilingual Swedish expatriates showed severe difficulties in
their written production of noun
phrase morphology (noun–adjective agreement) in Swedish.
However, the participants showed no
difficulty with V2 word order.
In more recent research, Sorace et al. have brought back the
discussion of transfer selectivity
to the forefront of current language acquisition and bilingualism
research (e.g. Serratrice et al.,
2004; Sorace, 2000, 2004, 2005; Sorace & Filiaci, 2006;
Tsimpli & Sorace, 2006). In contrast
with earlier studies, Sorace frames the discussion from a
generative grammar perspective in the
form of the Interface Hypothesis. As mentioned earlier, the
argument is that areas of the grammar
where the syntax interfaces with pragmatic factors (syntax–
pragmatics interface) are more diffi-

cult to acquire and easier to lose. However, the syntax proper is
acquired easily and remains
unproblematic. In a study examining the distribution of overt
subject pronouns in Italian, Sorace
(2000) found that Italian near-native speakers of English and
English-speaking learners of Italian
overgeneralize Italian overt pronouns in contexts where the null
option is normally preferred by
monolingual speakers. Moreover, the author found that both
bilingual groups optionally produce
preverbal subjects in focus contexts, where monolingual
speakers prefer the postverbal option.
However, Sorace found no difficulty with the null-subject status
of the Italian grammar. Only the
distribution of overt pronominal subjects, a syntax–discourse
interface condition, showed diffi-
culties. The author concludes that “L1 attrition, like L2 residual
optionality, seems to be restricted
to the interface between syntax and discourse/pragmatics
constraints; it does not seem to affect
the computational system itself” (p. 724). Within this view,
complex grammatical structures
requiring the integration of syntax and discourse factors might
be affected by transfer while the
syntax proper should remain stable.
The validity of the interface hypothesis was examined in Argyri
and Sorace’s (2007) study with
Greek–English bilingual children. The authors tested the
knowledge of both syntax–pragmatic
interface structures (distribution of subject pronouns) and
narrow syntactic structures (subject–
verb inversion in what-embedded questions, clitic placement) in
Greek by English–Greek bilingual
children. In contrast to what was expected, English-dominant
bilingual children showed transfer

effects from English in their acceptability and production of
preverbal subjects in Greek what-
embedded questions. Argyri and Sorace argue that these
difficulties with narrow syntactic proper-
ties stem from processing difficulties rather than representation
deficits and the amount of L2 input
received. In more recent work, Wilson, Sorace, and Keller
(2008) argue that processing difficulty
at the interface is more involved not due to representational
issues but due to differences in the
allocation of attention resources. Competing constraints in the
L1 and the L2 may cause L2 learn-
ers to allocate processing resources differently than
monolingual native speakers.
In the case of incomplete acquisition, Montrul (2004) examined
the variable distribution of
overt subject pronouns as well as direct and indirect object
pronouns among Spanish heritage lan-
guage learners in the United States. Following Sorace’s
framework, Montrul analyzed the proper-
ties regulated by syntactic and pragmatic factors, such as the
pragmatic distribution of null and
overt subjects, as well as the use of the preposition a with
animate direct objects and semantically
based clitic doubling. Montrul found no difficulties regarding
the syntax of subjects and objects.
However, she did find difficulties and convergence patterns to
English in the discourse-pragmatic
浦原喜助�
浦原喜助�

Cuza 75
distribution of objects and in the pragmatic Topic and Focus
features that regulate overt and
null subjects. There was an overproduction of overt subject
pronouns by intermediate heritage
speakers, in contrast with monolinguals and advanced heritage
speakers who preferred the null
option. Montrul (2004) concluded that her results “further
confirm that while syntactic features
of subjects and objects remain intact, the grammars of lower
proficiency heritage speakers
show erosion or incomplete knowledge of both pragmatic and
semantic features of subjects and
objects…” (p. 127).
Sorace’s proposal is not without its skeptics. Many researchers
question the universality of an
interface vulnerability account (e.g. Bohnacker, 2007; Ionin &
Montrul, 2010; Ivanov, 2009;
Pérez-Leroux et al., 2011; Rothman, 2009a; Slabakova &
Ivanov, 2011). For instance, Bohnacker
(2007) examined whether syntactic structures in lower structural
projections (e.g. VP) were in fact
unproblematic and thus acquired earlier when compared to
higher functional projections (e.g. CP),
which are arguably more vulnerable and difficult to acquire
(e.g. Platzack, 2001). The author tested
the adult L2 acquisition of German and Swedish V2 constraints,
VP headedness, and verb-particle
constructions. In contrast with Platzack’s (2001) proposal, the
author found that Swedish-speaking
L2 learners of German and German-speaking L2 learners of
Swedish acquired V2 constraints from

very early on. However, they failed to reach native-like
attainment of syntactic properties, such as
transitive verb-particle constructions in Swedish and nonfinite
verb and object/complement place-
ment (OV) in German, which according to Platzack are
nonproblematic or invulnerable domains
(lower structural level). Bohnacker concludes that syntactic
structures at lower structural levels are
also difficult to acquire and that upper level constructions are
not deterministically vulnerable or
problematic.
Similar results against the interface hypothesis were found by
Rothman (2009a). The author
investigated the acquisition of the distributional properties of
null versus overt subject pronouns in
Spanish among intermediate and advanced English-speaking
learners. The results showed difficul-
ties among the intermediate learners in the two interpretation
tasks and in the translation task but
target performance among the advanced learners. Rothman
proposes that in contrast with interface
vulnerability approaches, syntax–pragmatic interface
phenomena are not inevitably predetermined
to fossilization. Another study testing the universality of
interface vulnerability accounts is the
study by Pérez-Leroux et al. (2011). The authors examined the
extent to which the syntax proper is
spared from transfer effects among 23 Spanish–English
bilingual children. Specifically, Pérez-
Leroux et al. investigated the effects of syntactic transfer in
clitic placement reconstruction con-
texts (clitic climbing), an optional word order not associated
with pragmatic or discourse factors.
An elicited imitation task showed a significant bias toward
forward repositioning (enclisis), in

contrast with the established monolingual norm favoring a
preverbal position (proclisis). Couched
within current minimalist assumptions, the authors argue that
transfer is not limited to syntax–
pragmatic interface structures.
In a more recent study with Spanish heritage speakers in the
United States, Montrul and Ionin
(2010) examined the distribution of definite articles in Spanish
and English. In Spanish, definite
plural nouns allow for a generic or specific interpretation
according to the pragmatic context. In
English, definite plural nouns are specific. Moreover, definite
articles in Spanish are used in inal-
ienable contexts as in María levantó la mano (“Mary raised her
hand”). Data from an acceptability
judgment task (AJT), a truth value judgment task, and a picture-
sentence task showed transfer
effects from English into Spanish in the interpretation of
definite articles with a generic interpreta-
tion but no difficulties with the distribution of definite articles
in inalienable possession contexts.
The authors concluded, against interface vulnerability
approaches, that syntax–semantic interface
phenomena are also affected by transfer in heritage language
development.
In sum, an interface vulnerability approach to crosslinguistic
influence argues for difficulties
affecting primarily syntax–pragmatics interface structures and
not core syntax. This is arguably
due to the complexity of interface-related structures and

processing factors. However, the claim
that difficulties are restricted to the syntax–discourse interface
is not clear, and current research in
L2 acquisition and bilingual development has indicated
otherwise. To investigate this issue further,
this study tests the knowledge of subject–verb inversion in
Spanish, a syntactic operation not
driven by pragmatic constraints, among US-born Spanish
heritage speakers. The following section
presents the syntactic description adopted in this study. This is
followed by the learnability impli-
cations, the research questions of the study and the hypotheses.
Subject–verb inversion in Spanish interrogatives
The syntax of inversion in Spanish and English wh-questions
Subject–verb inversion in argument wh-questions has a different
syntactic behavior in English and
Spanish (e.g. Baauw, 1998; Pesetsky & Torrego, 2001; Rizzi,
1996; Zagona, 2002). In Spanish, the
lexical verb always moves above the subject (COMP position).
This is applicable to both matrix
and embedded questions. In English, in contrast, the lexical
verb remains in situ. For matrix ques-
tions, the auxiliary raises to COMP position, and there is no
raising in embedded questions. Table 1
summarizes these differences.
As shown in Table 1, in both English and Spanish matrix
questions, there is raising, the auxil-
iary do in English and the lexical verb in Spanish (the C
position is filled by a finite element). With
embedded questions though, Spanish and English diverge. The
Spanish word order (…WH + V +
S) is ungrammatical in English. This is the crucial distinction

that I examine in this study.
I follow Rizzi’s (1996) T°-to-C° movement proposal that
crosslinguistic differences regarding
subject–verb inversion in interrogatives depend on the strength
of an interrogative feature
([+wh/Q]) in C° (the head of the complementizer phrase). This
feature may trigger verb movement
in the overt syntax (e.g. Adger, 2001; Chomsky, 1995; Radford,
1997; Rizzi, 1996).2 In Spanish,
the wh-word moves as an operator to the [Spec, CP] position
(sentence initial position) and the
finite verb raises first to the head of the inflectional phrase [T°]
and then subsequently raises to C°
(the position right after the wh-word) to check its strong wh-
feature [+wh/Q feature]. The subject
remains in situ at [Spec, TP], yielding the [WH-(Aux)-V-
Subject] word order (e.g. Ayoun, 2005;
Rizzi, 1996; Torrego, 1984; Zagona, 2002). This is applicable to
both matrix and embedded ques-
tions. In English, there is also wh-movement to [Spec, CP] in
matrix and embedded questions.
However, in contrast with Spanish, the lexical verb remains in
situ and only the auxiliary verb
Table 1. English and Spanish matrix and embedded wh-
questions.
Wh-question type Grammatical Ungrammatical
Matrix wh-question
Spanish ¿Qué compró Juan? *¿Qué Juan compró?
English What did John buy? *What John bought?
Embedded wh-question
Spanish Me pregunto qué compró Juan. *Me pregunto qué Juan
compró.

English I wonder what John bought. *I wonder what bought
John.
浦原喜助�
Cuza 77
moves up in matrix questions. In this case, there is auxiliary
inversion in the form of do support or
dummy do. The finite auxiliary do generates in T° (head INFL
position within TP), checks its Spec
features and then moves to C° position (head of CP). In
embedded questions, there is no verb rais-
ing from T° to C° (auxiliary or lexical verb) since [Q] is weak,
and therefore, no movement is
required or triggered (2b) (e.g. Adger, 2001; Radford, 1997).3
To summarize, Spanish and English show different syntactic
options in terms of subject–verb
placement in wh-questions. In Spanish, all argument wh-
questions (matrix and embedded) present
an obligatory subject–verb inversion. The lexical verb must
raise from T° to C°. The C° position is
always filled by an element moved from T°. In English,
subject–lexical verb inversion is not
allowed. The finite verb always remains in situ and subject–
auxiliary verb inversion (do-support)
is required with matrix questions but not with embedded
questions. In English-embedded ques-
tions, the C° position remains empty. Given these syntactic
differences, I would expect English-
dominant heritage speakers of Spanish to show more difficulty
with the acquisition of subject–verb

inversion with embedded questions due to structural
crosslinguistic influence from English.
Learnability considerations
The L1 acquisition of subject–verb inversion in Spanish
interrogatives is unproblematic. Spanish
monolingual children develop subject–verb inversion
simultaneously with the appearance of wh-
questions during an early age (e.g. Grinstead & Elizondo, 2001;
Pérez-Leroux, 1993; Pérez-Leroux
& Dalious, 1998). For Spanish heritage language learners, the
acquisition task is more challenging.
Prescriptively, heritage language learners have to learn that in
Spanish, the main verb must appear
immediately after the wh-word in both matrix and embedded
wh-questions. This syntactic opera-
tion is not operative in English, and therefore, there is a
potential transfer from English into
Spanish, crucially with embedded questions. Moreover, heritage
speakers may be exposed to
reduced input of these structures leading to the nonspecification
of L2 options.
Mandell (1998) examined the L2 acquisition of this syntactic
property as part of the Verb
Movement Parameter (e.g. Pollock, 1989) among English-
speaking learners of Spanish at different
levels of language development. The results from a timed
grammaticality judgment task and a
timed dehydrated sentence task (DST) showed a gradual
parameter-resetting pattern among the L2
learners. In a DST, the participant is presented with scrambled
constituents separated by slashes
and asked to combine them to form a logical sentence. The
results showed obligatory inversion

with wh-phrase fronting, optional inversion with yes/no
questions, and optional adverbial place-
ment between lexical verbs and object determiner phases (DPs).
The author, however, did not test
the acceptability or production of inverted (grammatical) wh-
questions or inversion with embed-
ded questions. Similar results were found by Bruhn de Garavito
(2001) while examining the acqui-
sition of verb raising among early and late Spanish–English
bilinguals. The results from a preference
task showed no inversion problems with matrix questions among
early and late bilinguals. The
author did not test the knowledge of inversion with embedded
questions, as in the case of Mandell’s
study, which has been shown to be more derivationally complex
and thus more difficult to acquire
(e.g. Jakubowicz & Strik, 2008).
Research questions and hypotheses
Assuming current proposals on the role of crosslinguistic
influence which spares narrow syntax
and previous research, the empirical question that I pose is
whether Spanish heritage learners born
in the United States have difficulty with subject–verb placement
in Spanish interrogatives. The
fundamental research questions underlying the study are as
follows:
1. In contrast with interface vulnerability accounts, is subject–
verb inversion in Spanish inter-

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