ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the management of the Spanish verbal system by beginning Spanish heritage language learners; the main goal is to understand the use of the Spanish verbal system considering three central components: tense, aspect and mood (TAM). The quantitative analysis provides a portrait of morphological and semantic productive knowledge and uncovers areas of difficulty for heritage language learners. Overall, these learners show command over simple tenses, exploit a few perfect forms, and heavily rely on the Spanish indicative mood. The chapter concludes with two perspectives for instruction, with focus on those areas of major difficulties in tense and mood selection.
