Adult learners have persistent diffi culty processing second language (L2) infl ectional morphology. We investigate associative learning explanations that involve the blocking of later experienced cues by earlier learned ones in the fi rst language (L1; i.e., transfer) and the L2 (i.e., profi ciency). Sagarra ( 2008 ) and Ellis and Sagarra ( 2010b ) found that, unlike Spanish monolinguals, intermediate English-Spanish learners rely more on salient adverbs than on less salient verb infl ections,

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... but it is not clear whether this preference is a result of a default or a L1-based strategy. To address this question, 120 English (poor morphology) and Romanian (rich morphology) learners of Spanish (rich morphology) and 98 English, Romanian, and Spanish monolinguals read sentences in L2 Spanish (or their L1 in the case of the monolinguals) containing adverb-verb and verb-adverb congruencies or incongruencies and chose one of four pictures after each sentence (i.e., two that competed for meaning and two for form). Eye-tracking data revealed signifi cant effects for (a) sensitivity (all participants were sensitive to tense incongruencies), (b) cue location in the sentence (participants spent