Knowledge of mood in internal and external interface contexts in Spanish heritage speakers in the Netherlands

This study investigates Spanish heritage speakers in the Netherlands on their judgments of Spanish mood in a syntactic context and in two interface contexts: the internal interface between syntax and semantics and the external interface between syntax and pragmatics. The strong version of the Interface hypothesis predicts most vulnerability in the external interface context, and least in the syntactic context. The results of a scalar acceptability judgment task provide support for this hypothesis. We furthermore discuss other possibly relevant factors such as cross-linguistic influence, the default status of the indicative, order of L1 acquisition and variability and frequency in monolingual Spanish.