The goal of this research is to expand the findings on clitic pronouns in agrammatic aphasia (results from my Ph.D. thesis) to the field of

adult second language acquisition (L1 English speakers learning Spanish as L2), trying to converge results from production and comprehension.

The research questions addressed are:

1) To which extent can adult English learners of Spanish (being English a clitic-free language) acquire the Spanish clitic system?

2) Will there be dissociation between production and comprehension of the clitic system in adults L2 learners of Spanish and, in case,

will there be a correlation with the different proficiency levels?

3) Will there be a difference in the neurophysiological processing of clitic pronouns between L1 and adult L2 learners of Spanish? Will the neurophysiological measures for L2 speakers be affected by proficiency?

4) Will it be possible to observe a convergence in the performance (production and comprehension) between agrammatic speakers and adult L2 learners of Spanish?

In this research both off-line (grammaticality judgment task, self-paced reading task) and on-line (ERPs, eye-tracking) testing techniques are used.  Behavioral (accuracy and reaction times) and neurophysiological measures of clitic pronoun processing will be recorded. The first one, give fundamental information about how different linguistic parameters are processed, and they importantly highlight differences between experimental groups. Neurophysiological measures provide physiological correlates of behavioral differences, possibly informing us on how clitics are processed by the brain of L1 and late L2 learners.