Prosodic Transfer at Different Levels of Structure: The L2 Acquisition of Spanish Plurals Heather Goad 1 , Lydia White 1 , and Joyce Bruhn de Garavito 2 1 McGill University and 2 University of Western Ontario 1. Introduction * A growing body of literature attributes second language (L2) learners’ difficulties with inflection to the transfer of constraints on prosodic structure from the native (L1) grammar. There is disagreement, however, about the level of structure implicated: syllable structure (Lardiere 1998, 2003, Bruhn de Garavito 2008) or higher prosodic structure (Goad, White & Steele 2003, Goad & White 2006). We adopt the latter position, reanalysing results from Bruhn de Garavito (2008). We argue that the difficulties that French-speaking L2ers have with Spanish plural are due to French lacking the adjunction structure required for target-like representation of Spanish plural. Our proposal is couched within the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis (PTH) which states that difficulties that L2 learners have with the production of functional morphology are due to constraints on prosodic structure transferred from the L1 grammar (Goad, White & Steele 2003, Goad & White 2004). In earlier work, we have observed not only that functional material may be deleted due to prosodic transfer but also that (i) it may be pronounced variably depending on phonological factors (e.g. producing or deleting inflection depending on the shape of the preceding rhyme (Goad & White 2006)), or (ii) it may be pronounced in non-target-like fashion (e.g. producing articles as stressed (Goad & White 2008, 2009)). In our previous work, we focused on the acquisition of verbal morphology (tense and agreeement), as well as articles, in L2 English. In this paper, we report on the acquisition of plural morphology in L2 Spanish. We show that lower proficiency French-speaking learners of Spanish supply the plural variably; at the same time, when plural is supplied, stress is shifted to the syllable containing the plural suffix. We argue that these properties are formally connected: both reveal that plural is prosodically organized in a non-target manner, specifically, in the same manner as inflection is organized in the L1 grammar. 2. Plural inflection in French and Spanish Plural inflection is not overtly realized on nouns in French, even when the noun is vowel-final; see (1a). Although it is realized if the following word in the DP, noun or adjective, is vowel-initial, as in (1b-c), it is only pronounced when its source is a determiner; when its source is the noun, as in (1d), it is not realized, except in very formal speech or recitation of poetry. (1) French plural inflection: a. deux ami-s ‘two friends’ Ø b. les amis ‘the friends’ [z] c. ses anciennes femmes ‘his former wives’ (adj-N) [z] d. les chaussures oranges ‘the orange shoes’ (N-adj) *[z] * We would like to thank Gustavo Beritognolo and Kalman Sutker for research assistance and the audiences at GALANA and BU for questions and comments. This work was supported by grants from SSHRC and FQRSC.