Production of Subject-Verb Agreement in Spanish as a Second Language

In this paper, we report the results of a study of English speakers who have learned Spanish as a second language. All were late learners who have achieved near-advanced proficiency in Spanish. The focus of the research is on the production of subject-verb agreement errors and the factors that influence the incidence of such errors. There is some evidence that English and Spanish subject-verb agreement differ in susceptibility to interference from different types of variables; specifically, it has been reported that Spanish speakers show a greater influence of semantic factors in their implementation of subject-verb agreement (Vigliocco, Butterworth, & Garrett, 1996). In our study, all participants were tested in English (L1) and Spanish (L2). Results indicate nearly identical error patterns: these speakers show no greater influence of semantic variables in the computation of agreement when they are speaking Spanish than when they are speaking English.