My general interests are: bilingualism and multilingualism; syntactic and morphological theory applied to language acquisition; bilingualism and potential language change; heritage languages; the development of non-native languages; the nature of interlanguage grammars. 

Some of the linguistic properties that I have investigated more in-depth are: relative clauses, copulas and existential constructions, non-personal clitics, gender, TAM morphology. 

Languages: Spanish, Catalan, Italian, English.

My training in experimental SLA has brought me to investigate Catalan-Spanish bilingualism from these lenses, creating what I consider pioneer work on the morphosyntactic development of Catalan and Spanish in different types of bilinguals (Perpiñán, 2017; 2018; Perpiñán & Soto-Corominas, 2021). As a Catalan-Spanish bilingual myself, I feel very passionate about this project. Despite a large number of sociolinguistic studies on the bilingualism situation of Catalonia, there is an alarming lack of linguistic studies that examine how both languages are acquired in a bilingual context, how these languages simultaneously develop, and how they interact throughout the life of a bilingual. Together with Aurora Bel, and the ALLENCAM research group we aim to grant Catalan-Spanish bilingualism the place it deserves in the study of bilingualism at large by revealing universal processes and outcomes of early bilingualism in a bilingual society. To investigate this topic, the Science and Innovation Federal Department (Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación) has awarded us an I+D+I 2020 research grant (PID2020-114276GB-I00) for the next three years (72,000 € + one pre-doctoral student fellowship for four years).

One related issue that is of crucial importance in the study of bilingualism is its measurement. In Perpiñán & Soto-Corominas (2021), we present the first version of a Language Dominance Questionaire, the LaDoQ, which was conceived for the case and specificities of Catalan-Spanish societal bilingualism. Together with Adriana Soto-Corominas, we are working on improving and validating this test. Indeed, how to measure language dominance taking into account the social context of the bi/multilingual is one of the objectives of the recently funded Network MULTILINGUA (PI: Sílvia Perpiñán, RED2022-134920-T MULTILINGUA: Network on Bi/Multilingualism in Spain). Seven Spanish research groups participate in this Network: ALLENCAM (UPF, host institution, PI: Aurora Bel); UVALAL (Universidad de Valladolid, PI: Raquel Fernández Fuertes); ELEBILAB (Universidad del País Vasco / Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea, PI: Maria José Ezeizabarrena); GRAM (Universitat Internacional de Catalunya, PI: Adriana Soto-Corominas); Llenguatge i Cognició (Universitat de Girona, PI: Elisabet Serrat Sellabona); LVTC (Universidad de Vigo, Contact: M. Carme Parafita Couto); BASLA (Universitat de les Illes Balears, Contact: Estela García Alcaraz).

A further matter to consider when working experimentally on bilingualism with a minority language is the potential absence of a monolingual community. The lack of an (inexistent) control group has led prominent journals in the field to reject studies on minority languages by this mere fact, alleging that it is not possible to claim any sort of crosslinguistic influence effects without a comparable group in the minority language acting as the control group. To raise awareness on this worrying concern, in the summer of 2020, a good amount of researchers on bilingualism wrote a letter to the editors of the journal Bilingualism: Language and Cognition in order to change this practice that directly puts at risk the study of minority languages. This was BLC Editors' response. As a follow-up, a group of young colleagues published this position paper regarding bilingualism with minority languages. 

Another one of my ongoing research projects is on the acquisition and reassembly of several semantic features encoded in locative and existential predicates, such as definiteness and dynamicity, and the selection of copulas or existential predicates in second language learners. By comparing learners whose first language maps these features onto different grammatical forms, we can investigate how the form-meaning pairings develop depending on the previous grammatical knowledge and the target language. In particular, we have investigated this issue in the L2 Spanish of Arabic, English (Perpiñán, 2014; Perpiñán et al., 2020) Catalan (Perpiñán, 2015; Perpiñán & Soto-Corominas, 2021), and Italian speakers (Perpiñán & Marín, 2021; Perpiñán & Marín, in preparation). Together with Rafael Marín, we are expanding this line of research to francophone learners of Spanish. Ultimately, this project aims at providing a better understanding of the copulas through acquisitional data.   

I have worked and continue working on heritage languages, their main characteristics, development, maintenance, and possible loss. I worked on several projects of Prof. Silvina Montrul with Spanish heritage speakers, and I have supervised several graduate students conducting work on languages as a diverse as Spanish, Polish, Arabic, or Venetan as heritage languages. I am currently supervising a dissertation on Italian as a heritage language in Barcelona, and another one on English as a heritage language. Heritage speakers are bilingual by nature, who usually develop their linguistic abilities asymmetrically due to social factors, quantity, and quality of input received. Relatedly, I am a current member of the Multilingual Minds Project (MuMin), Grammar Interaction in Multilingual Acquisition, led by Dr. Natalia Mitrofanova at the UiT The Arctic University of Norway in the  AcqVA Aurora Centre (Acquisition, Variation & Attrition): The Dynamic Nature of Languages in the Mind

My dissertation (2010), directed by Prof. Silvina Montrul, was about the acquisition and processing of L2 Spanish oblique relative clauses by English and Arabic native speakers. Particularly, I investigated an interlanguage phenomenon known as Null Preposition, which consists of dropping the obligatory preposition in certain movement constructions. My research analyzed the processing, comprehension, and production of relative clauses (Perpiñán, 2015) as well as questions, islands (Perpiñán, 2020), and sluicing constructions (Perpiñán & Cardinaletti, 2022). Also, it explored the asymmetries between oral and written production (Perpiñán, 2013), and between production and comprehension when it comes to this type of structure. Together with Mike Putnam, we edited a special issue for Second Language Research on A-bar dependencies in developing and bilingual grammars.