A Comparison of Copula Choice: Native Spanish Speakers and Advanced Learners

Research on the acquisition of copula choice has shown that learners are not accurate with this structure, even after several years of instruction (Briscoe, 1995; Ryan & Lafford, 1992). Previous research has also shown that the language development of novice learners can be assessed through a multifeature contextual analysis, similar to those used in sociolinguistic research, thereby allowing for the inclusion of native‐speaker variation in the design (Geeslin, 2000). The current investigation compares contextualized questionnaire data from advanced learners of Spanish ( N = 28) to data from native Spanish speakers ( N = 25). The analysis shows that semantic and pragmatic features interact to predict the appearance of the copula estar , and that the factors that predict the appearance of estar are different for the two groups.