Linguistic variables of Comprehensibility, Accentedness and Fluency in L2 Spanish: Listener type and ability level differences

The aim of this study is to identify which linguistic variables are most strongly related to comprehensibility, accentedness and fluency in Spanish as L2, and how the results may also vary according to the type of listener (expert or non-expert) and to the speakers’ level of ability in these three dimensions. To this end, 40 native English speakers of Spanish orally described picture narratives that were subsequently rated by four groups of raters using 9-point Likert scales. The first two groups were composed of 109 novice and 42 expert raters assessing comprehensibility, accentedness and fluency. The last two groups consisted of 35 phoneticians and 35 linguistic raters responsible for analyzing and scoring a total of 14 speech measures (7 per group) targeting pronunciation, disfluencies, lexis, grammar and discourse. The results reveal that comprehensibility is associated with a wide range of elements, while accentedness is determined especially by segmentals, and fluency by speech rate. Additionally, the impact of linguistic parameters varies according to the speakers’ level of performance, and there are differences between novice and expert raters, with the former being more affected by pronunciation and the experts by lexis and grammar.

Adjectival and verbal agreement in the oral production of early and late bilinguals

Extended oral production has seldom been used to explore adjectival and verbal agreement in L2 Spanish. This study examines oral narrations to compare the agreement behavior, speech rates, and patterns of errors of highly proficient Spanish heritage and L2 learners (early and late bilinguals, respectively), whose L1 is English, with those of native controls. Although both bilingual groups displayed high agreement accuracy scores, only the early bilinguals performed at or close to ceiling. In addition, the L2 learners spoke significantly more slowly than the heritage and native speakers, who displayed similar speech rates. Explanations accounting for the differences in speech rates and agreement accuracy include age of acquisition of Spanish, syntactic distance between a noun and its adjective, and task effects. All of these factors favored the early bilinguals, enhancing their advantages over L2 learners. Findings suggest that the integrated knowledge and automatic access needed for native-like attainment in agreement behavior in extended oral production is more easily achievable by early than by late bilinguals.

CEDEL2: Design, compilation and web interface of an online corpus for L2 Spanish acquisition research

This article presents and reviews a new methodological resource for research in second language acquisition (SLA), CEDEL2 ( Corpus Escrito del Español L2 ‘L2 Spanish Written Corpus’), and its free online search-engine interface ( cedel2.learnercorpora.com ). CEDEL2 is a multi-first-language corpus (Spanish, English, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, French, Greek, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, and Arabic) of L2 Spanish learners at all proficiency levels. It additionally contains several native control subcorpora (English, Portuguese, Greek, Japanese, and Arabic). Its latest release (version 2) holds material from around 4,400 speakers, which amounts to over 1,100,000 words. CEDEL2 follows strict corpus-design criteria (Sinclair, 2005) and L2 corpus-design recommendations (Tracy-Ventura and Paquot, 2021), and all subcorpora are equally designed to be fully contrastable, as recommended by Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (Granger, 2015). Thanks to its design and web interface, CEDEL2 allows for complex searches which can be further narrowed down according to its SLA-motivated variables, e.g. first language (L1), proficiency level, self-reported proficiency level, age of onset to the L2, length of exposure to the L2, length of residence in a Spanish-speaking country, knowledge of other foreign languages, type of task, etc. These CEDEL2 features allow L2 researchers to address SLA questions and hypotheses.

Corpora and L2 acquisition: the L1 Portuguese – L2 Spanish subcorpus of CEDEL2

This paper presents the L1 Portuguese – L2 Spanish subcorpus of Corpus Escrito del Español L2 (CEDEL2), a new methodological resource for second language acquisition (SLA) research, which is freely searchable and downloadable (http://cedel2.learnercorpora.com). CEDEL2 is a large-scale, multi-L1 learner corpus of L2 Spanish which contains written productions from learners at all proficiency levels as well as 6 native control subcorpora (total size: over 1,100,000 words from over 4,000 participants). CEDEL2 follows strict corpus design criteria (Sinclair, 2005) and learner corpus design recommendations (Tracy-Ventura & Paquot, 2021a). In its current version (CEDEL2 v. 2), its Portuguese component includes an L1 Portuguese – L2 Spanish subcorpus, with 21,662 words written by 164 participants, and an L1 Portuguese native subcorpus, with 3,500 words from 16 L1 speakers of European Portuguese. Thanks to their design features (e.g., same design across subcorpora, inclusion of metadata about SLA-relevant variables, dual native control subcorpora) and freely available web interface, CEDEL2 and its Portuguese subcorpora allow researchers to investigate a wide range of topics in SLA.

Lexical diversity in an L2 Spanish learner corpus

This study examines the impact of two topic-related variables (i.e., valence polarity and everyday-life closeness) on the lexical diversity scores (i.e., MTLD) of learners of L2 Spanish at different proficiency levels. The analysis included 3,045 texts written in response to two pairs of prompts by 1,165 students enrolled in an L2 Spanish program. The first pair of prompts asked learners to narrate an event: prompt 1 focused on a perfect vacation (positive event), while prompt 2 asked participants to tell a terrible story (negative event). The second pair asked to describe a person: prompt 1 required that the subject be famous, thus not close to the writer, whereas prompt 2 required that the subject be special and close to the writer. Results indicate that lexical diversity scores were higher for the texts written about the positive event and the famous subject across all proficiency levels.

Failed gender agreement in L1 English L2 Spanish: Syntactic or lexical problem?

According to representational accounts (Hawkins & Franceschina, 2004), the inability to acquire abstract syntactic features after a critical period explains L2 difficulties with gender, while according to lexical accounts (Grüter et al. 2012; Hopp 2012), gender assignment issues – the inability to assigned to a target-like class accounts for these difficulties. We explore three potential agreement cues: 1) semantic gender relating to sex (e.g. ‘girl’ vs. ‘boy’) 2) morphophonological transparency cues, and 3) syntactic agreement cues. Semantic and morphophonological cues may facilitate gender agreement only for a subset of nouns, whereas agreement cues can do so for all nouns, including opaque gender nouns that do not have semantic gender. Seventeen low proficiency and sixteen high proficiency L1 English L2 Spanish speakers and seventeen native Spanish controls judged the grammaticality of 60 experimental sentences. We compared participants’ gender agreement accuracy and reaction times (RTs) on experimental items with and without semantic gender, and with and without transparent gender morphemes. Semantic gender did not serve as a cue for gender assignment/agreement; instead, it slowed down RTs in high proficiency and control participants. Morphophonological cues significantly increased accuracy and decreased RTs in all groups. Finally, agreement cues did not seem to help low proficiency learners, since their accuracy on opaque nouns was barely above chance. This suggests that they did not effectively use agreement cues to assign gender. By contrast, high proficiency learners exhibited native-like accuracy on opaque nouns. These findings support the lexical accounts of gender agreement difficulties, against the representational accounts.