This volume presents sixteen new articles on the acquisition of Romance languages by both well-established researchers and vital new contributors to the field. Under a generative umbrella, the articles in this collection investigate the acquisition of French, Romanian, Spanish, Catalan, Italian and Portuguese across different contexts including first language acquisition, bilingual acquisition, specifically impaired first language acquisition, child L2 acquisition, second language acquisition, as well as first language attrition. This volume advances our understanding of how languages are acquired and how the study of Romance languages contributes to clarifying challenging open questions on the acquisition of key functional categories and other related phenomena. In particular, the articles included assess complexity as a relevant factor shaping children's acquisition of syntactic and phonological structures, they refine crucial theoretical constructs such as parameter setting and language transfer, and propose language change as another crucial factor affecting the process of language acquisition and attrition.
Pedro Guijarro-Fuentes is a Reader in Spanish. His research interests are in the interdisciplinary field of Spanish applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and bilingualism. His main current research projects include amongst others the study of copula verbs ser/estar and spatial prepositions by L2 learners, projects funded by the British Academy and the Art and Humanities Research Council. He has authored and co-authored numerous articles and book chapters, and his research has appeared in different international, refereed journals such as Language Learning, Bilingualism: language and Cognition, Cognition, Studies in Second language Acquisition, Applied Linguistics and International Journal of Bilingualism amongst others.Laura Domķnguez is an Assistant Professor (Lecturer) in Linguistics at the University of Southampton (UK). Her research includes publications in the areas of language development (first and second language acquisition, bilingualism and language attrition), and syntactic theory (syntax and the interfaces, information structure, Romance syntax and Hispanic linguistics). She is currently the principal investigator of the Spanish Learner Language Oral Corpus (SPLLOC) project which has established a high quality database of spoken learner Spanish in order to carry out research into L2 Spanish, in particular in the areas of word order, tense and aspect, and clitic pronouns. Recent publications have appeared in Second Language Research, the International Journal of Bilingualism, and the Journal of Linguistics.
