In several of the most widely read Spanish grammars an entire chapter is devoted to the two copular verbs in Spanish, ser “to be” and estar “to be”, and their many contexts of use (Bull, 1965; Solé and Solé, 1977; Whitley, 1986; Bosque and Demonte, 1999; King and Suñer, 1999; Butt and Benjamin, 2000). For some, the interest in this structure stems from the range of meanings that can be expressed with these two forms, whereas for others it is the variability in the use of these verbs with adjectives, existing between groups, individuals and particular social contexts, that generates inquiry. The combination of these two traits makes the contrast difficult to acquire and likely to be lost or weakened in contexts of language attrition or language contact (Silva-Corvalán, 1986; Geeslin, 2002) and this complexity makes the copula contrast in Spanish an excellent mechanism for exploring broader issues such as theories of acquisition and language change, which are of value to a readership well beyond those working directly on Spanish. After a brief description of the distribution of ser and estar, we provide an overview of the various theoretical descriptions of the copula contrast that exist and their implications for research on bilingualism. Next, we provide a description of the papers in this volume, and outline the areas of interest for readers whose research extends beyond Spanish grammar.

An article-choice study involving L1 Mandarin/L2 English bilinguals is reported. It tested two recent accounts on the representation of English articles in L2 grammars (where L1 has no articles). The Fluctuation Hypothesis (Ionin, Ko and Wexler, 2004) predicts that L2 speakers will have full access to UG, but will fluctuate between the settings of the postulated Article Choice Parameter; article choices will be influenced by [±specificity]. The syntactic misanalysis account, on which L2 articles are treated as adjectives (Trenkic, 2007), predicts that article choices will be influenced by the objective identifiability of referents. By discussing the notion of specificity and emphasising problems in its operationalisation, the current study introduces an innovative design to reveal that what was previously observed as the effect of specificity on L2 article choices (full UG access) is better described as an effect of the stated/denied familiarity with the referent (an extra-linguistic factor).

The purpose of this paper is to draw on recent studies of bilingualism and emotions to argue for three types of modifications to the current models of the bilingual lexicon. The first modification involves word categories: I will show that emotion words need to be considered as a separate class of words in the mental lexicon, represented and processed differently from abstract and concrete words. The second modification involves conceptual representations: I will demonstrate that emotion concepts vary across languages and that bilinguals' concepts may, in some cases, be distinct from those of monolingual speakers. The third modification involves emotionality: I will argue that emotionality is an important feature of the bilingual lexicon, where different languages and word types display different levels of emotionality. I will also show how differential emotionality affects code-switching and language choice in bi- and multilinguals.

In her thoughtful work regarding various aspects of emotion and emotion related words, Pavlenko explores a variety of perspectives on how we might characterize and conceptualize expressions of emotion. It is a work that is quite rich in breadth – one that leads to a variety of different thoughts on this topic, many of which are amenable to experimental exploration. Thus, the work prompts the field into asking new and interesting questions. My comments will relate some of these new directions that are prompted by reading Pavlenko's paper, as well as a few ideas that constitute a bit of a reinterpretation of her conclusions. Towards the end, a body of literature (i.e., Emotional Stroop Effects) that is highly relevant but was not covered will be noted as it yields a greater understanding of the activation and access of emotion.

The current study addresses the challenge of investigating the SLA of estar with adjectives when highlighting two specific contextual meanings: comparisons within an individual frame of reference and speaker reactions as a result of immediate experience with the referent. Estar is examined within these contexts using a picture-description task and a contextualized preference task specifically designed to create clear and unambiguous contexts of comparison and immediate experience. One hundred and eleven English-speaking Spanish students at four different levels of proficiency participated in the research. Findings from the study are examined in relation to recent predictive models as well as future directions for the study of the SLA of Spanish copula choice.

The present article investigates the acquisition of the pronominal systems by French and Italian monolingual children and by bilingual German–French and German–Italian children, demonstrating a stable asymmetry: object and reflexive clitics are acquired later than nominative clitics and strong subject and object pronouns. We will widen the scope of former investigations to include the acquisition of strong pronouns and argue that the observed asymmetry can be accounted for if we combine the external (categorial status) and internal syntax of pronouns (internal structure). In particular, we argue for the relevance of the absence/presence of a nominal layer (N-layer) in the internal structure of a pronoun. This approach can account for the observation that pronouns containing an N-layer, i.e., strong subject pronouns, subject clitics and strong object pronouns, are acquired simultaneously and earlier than pronouns which lack the N-layer, i.e., object clitics and reflexive clitics.

Pavlenko urges the community of language researchers to modify their conceptions of the mental lexicon, based on findings from bilingualism and emotions. She makes a compelling case. While reading her article, one can temporarily forget that in contemporary practice, emotion is not regarded as relevant to the theoretical question of the structure of the mental lexicon.

Speech–sign or “bimodal” bilingualism is exceptional because distinct modalities allow for simultaneous production of two languages. We investigated the ramifications of this phenomenon for models of language production by eliciting language mixing from eleven hearing native users of American Sign Language (ASL) and English. Instead of switching between languages, bilinguals frequently produced code-blends (simultaneously produced English words and ASL signs). Code-blends resembled co-speech gesture with respect to synchronous vocal–manual timing and semantic equivalence. When ASL was the Matrix Language, no single-word code-blends were observed, suggesting stronger inhibition of English than ASL for these proficient bilinguals. We propose a model that accounts for similarities between co-speech gesture and code-blending and assumes interactions between ASL and English Formulators. The findings constrain language production models by demonstrating the possibility of simultaneously selecting two lexical representations (but not two propositions) for linguistic expression and by suggesting that lexical suppression is computationally more costly than lexical selection.

The use of social vs. cognitive approaches to the study of second language acquisition (SLA) has engendered considerable debate in the field. For instance, the recent Modern Language Journal Focus Issue (Lafford, 2007a) reviewed the ongoing debate between scholars espousing socially- and cognitively-grounded approaches to SLA research and explored the extent to which SLA scholars have answered Firth and Wagner's (1997, p. 286) call for a reconceptualization of SLA “as a more theoretically and methodologically balanced enterprise that endeavours to attend to, explicate, and explore, in more equal measures and, where possible, in integrated ways, both the social and cognitive dimensions of S/FL [second/foreign language] use and acquisition”. Firth and Wagner (1997, p. 286) specifically called for “(a) a significantly enhanced awareness of the contextual and interactional dimensions of language use, (b) an increased emic (i.e., participant-relevant) sensitivity towards fundamental concepts, and (c) the broadening of the traditional SLA data base”.

This paper presents two experiments in the acquisition of the nominal domain in English by Japanese and Spanish second language (L2) learners. The first experiment tests the L2 learners' ability to distinguish between count and mass nouns using a grammaticality judgement task and the second experiment tests learners on different types of definite (based on J. Hawkins's 1978 taxonomy) in count and mass contexts by means of a forced-choice elicitation task. The claim by Chierchia (1998a, b) is that there is a Nominal Mapping Parameter and the three languages discussed in this paper each have a different parametric value. The aim of the paper is to test Japanese and Spanish L2 learners of English to see whether they can reset the parameter to the English setting.

This study investigates the developmental rate of estar production by Chinese-speaking learners in planned written production. The forms of Spanish copula verbs have no equivalent forms in Chinese in pre-adjectival position (i.e. no copula verb exists between a referent and an adjective in Chinese). This contrast between languages provides a number of opportunities for novel insights into copula acquisition, including universality and developmental dynamics. Thus, this research examines, particularly, factors that are associated with estar use in a pre-adjectival position. Unlike early copula acquisition studies which examined accuracy rates, this research examines semantic, pragmatic, and lexical characteristics of copula use (Geeslin, 2000, 2003) within the context of free written essays. Beginner and intermediate level Chinese-speaking learners of Spanish seem to acquire copula choice through a lexical and semantic approach. As learner vocabulary expands, pragmatic and semantic features (prior experience and animate-change) become most salient in relation to higher rates of use of estar in a free writing task. While the research methods of this study differ from those of Geeslin (2000, 2003), some findings are comparable. Results indicate that the methods used here can be used to glean further novel insights from the SLA process of Chinese-speaking learners.

Pavlenko's keynote paper calls for a rethinking of models of the mental lexicon in the light of recent research into emotion and bilingualism. The author makes a convincing case for the inclusion of affective aspects in the study of the mental lexicon. Indeed, the knowledge of the degree of emotionality of a word and of its affective valence is just as important as the knowledge of that word's grammatical class, or its gender. From a pragmatic point of view, one could argue that an L2 user's inaccurate or incomplete understanding of the emotionality and valence of an emotion word, or an emotion-laden word, in the L2 might lead to unwanted illocutionary effects, which might be far more embarrassing than phonological, morphological or syntactical errors.

What Aneta Pavlenko discusses in this fascinating article is so widely researched, so cogently conceptualized and so richly reflected upon, that one feels like a spoilsport to bring up a debate which the author herself claims to have avoided, namely the “universalist/relativist debate about basic emotions”. If I do so in this Commentary, it is not to invalidate the large body of work in cross-cultural psychology and cross-cultural semantics that Pavlenko refers to, nor to put into question the wealth of data she and Jean-Marc Dewaele have collected through their international webquestionnaire, but to bring to the fore the dilemma in which any bilingual researcher of bilingualism finds herself.

Initial studies on the acquisition of two Spanish copulas, ser and estar, emerged from a research agenda exploring whether second language (L2) development was driven by universal mechanisms manifested in stages rather than an accumulation of entities (Rutherford, 1987). Concerning the Spanish copulas, the stages of acquisition through which Spanish L2 learners pass seem – with a few exceptions – to be largely uniform (e.g. estar + locative, ser/estar + adjective; VanPatten, 1987; Ryan & Lafford, 1992; Geeslin, 2000). Cheng, Lu and Giannakouros provide one of the first studies which partially test the assumption of universality, examining Mandarin Chinese speakers' copula behaviors over different levels of development. The work of Geeslin as well as Cheng, Lu and Giannakouros is valuable not so much because it provides insights into copula development but rather because this work is building a model for predicting the interaction in general terms between aspectual, semantic, and pragmatic factors and the acquisition of both grammatical and lexical L2 phenomena.

Previous research has shown that bilingual children excel in tasks requiring inhibitory control to ignore a misleading perceptual cue. The present series of studies extends this finding by identifying the degree and type of inhibitory control for which bilingual children demonstrate this advantage. Study 1 replicated the earlier research by showing that bilingual children perform the Simon task more rapidly than monolinguals, but only on conditions in which the demands for inhibitory control were high. The next two studies compared performance on tasks that required inhibition of attention to a specific cue, like the Simon task, and inhibition of a habitual response, like the day–night Stroop task. In both studies, bilingual children maintained their advantage on tasks that require control of attention but showed no advantage on tasks that required inhibition of response. These results confine the bilingual advantage found previously to complex tasks requiring control over attention to competing cues (interference suppression) and not to tasks requiring control over competing responses (response inhibition).

This paper reports on an empirical study that examined knowledge of eventive and stative passives in the L2 Spanish grammar of L1 speakers of English. Although the two types of passive exist in English, the difference between them is not signaled in any specific way. In Spanish, in contrast, the distinction is marked by the choice of copula: ser is used to form eventive passives, estar for statives. Researchers agree that the two copulas, both of which translate as English “to be”, differ in relation to aspect: estar is perfective while ser is not marked for aspect (Schmitt, 1992). The question was whether L2 learners would be able to acquire the aspectual difference of the copulas and apply it to the formation of the passives. Two main tests were used, a Grammaticality Judgment Task and a Sentence Selection Task. The Grammaticality Judgment Task examined properties of the passives related, among other things, to aspect and agentivity. The Sentence Selection Task focused on the interpretation of the subject: only the subject of ser can be interpreted as generic. Although the learners in general distinguished between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences, they had not acquired the restriction on subject interpretation. These results are explained in terms of interfaces.

We examined how linguistic context influences the nature of bilingual lexical activation. We hypothesized that in single-word context, form-related words would receive the strongest activation while, in sentence context, semantically related words would receive the strongest activation. Spanish–English bilinguals performed a semantic verification task on English target words preceded by a prime. On critical trials, the prime and target words were paired based either on a form-mediated relationship through the native language (L1), [e.g., bark (barco): BOAT] (Experiment 1) or on a semantically-mediated relationship [e.g., boat (barco): BARK] (Experiment 2). The prime word was presented either in isolation or after a sentence context. In Experiment 1 interference was observed in the single word condition only. In Experiment 2 interference was observed in both single-word and sentence contexts. The findings demonstrate that the context in which words are embedded has an impact on the type of lexical competitors that become active.

I am in full agreement with Aneta Pavlenko's analysis of the data and her line of reasoning about emotion words and emotion concepts, but not with her claim that the findings are unique to the study of bilingualism, and that differential language emotionality is uniquely visible in bi- and multilingual speakers. I will argue that (i) emotion words and concepts behave like other aspects of bilingualism, exhibit the same kinds of phenomena, and are susceptible to the same types of interference; (ii) the phenomena observed about emotion words and emotion concepts are not unique to bilinguals but merely more salient; and (iii) what applies in any conceptual domain applies within the emotion domain as well, in both unilinguals' and bilinguals' conceptual systems.

Heretofore, we learned that bilinguals better detected letters in inter-lingual homographs when the context language ascribed a content role to the homograph as compared to a function role. In previous work the target homographs appeared in passages that were of a single language. The present work investigated whether this letter detection pattern would hold if both languages were activated by intermixing languages in a passage. Results suggested that despite intermixing of languages that would excite competing function and content meanings, local sentence context was sufficient to engender a content over function word advantage for inter-lingual homographs that was reminiscent of that obtained with homogenous text.

Any person who has taught Spanish as a second language or who has interacted with a non-native speaker of Spanish can easily tell that mastering the correct use of the copulas ser and estar is very difficult in both spoken and written production. But L2 learners are not alone. The Spanish copulas also present difficulty and frustration for L2 instructors of Spanish, since most pedagogical explanations of the uses of ser and estar provided in textbooks are incomplete and inaccurate. However, the acquisition of copular constructions has not received the attention it deserves in the acquisition literature, making a special issue of Bilingualism: Language and Cognition dedicated to this topic particularly welcome. A reason for the scarcity of research in this area may be related to both the linguistic complexity of Spanish ser and estar and the inadequacy of many available theoretical treatments to explain their complementary distribution. Although constructions with ser and estar are highly frequent in the input, they are grammatically quite intricate, straddling between the levels of morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Accordingly, Bruhn de Garavito and Valenzuela correctly frame their study within the current debate on interface vulnerability in language development in general, and in adult L2 acquisition in particular (Sorace, 2004; White, in press). In a nutshell, grammatical areas which require the integration of different levels of linguistic knowledge (e.g., syntax–discourse, syntax–morphology, morphology–semantics, etc.) for processing, production, or interpretation, show developmental delays and instability in monolingual and bilingual acquisition. In the case of monolingual acquisition, instability or non-target-like behavior is temporary, but in L2 grammars, instability can persist up to very advanced levels of proficiency, eventually leading to fossilization.