The L2 Development of Subject Form Variation in Spanish: The Individual vs. the Group

Abstract

This paper reports on a variationist study of individual and group patterns of Spanish subject form selection by English-speaking learners at several levels of proficiency and a native speaker comparison group. The theoretical motivation for this study was to further test the assumption that idiosyncratic patterns of linguistic variation in interlanguage systems reflect group patterns. Participants' responses to a written contextualized elicitation task demonstrated that the impact of the individual decreased as proficiency increased for all learner groups except the most advanced (graduate level) group. Findings are discussed in light of previous research and areas for further investigation are outlined.