Dr. Matt Kanwit has published a new collaborative article with Dr. Megan Solon in the journal Applied Linguistics, currently rated #1 of 193 linguistics journals, with an impact factor of 5.741. Their article assesses communicative competence through a new task targeting Spanish intervocalic /d/ deletion. Results revealed that second-language learners’ preference for a deleted variant tended to increase as proficiency level increased, as did sensitivity to variables previously shown to constrain first-language Spanish patterns of variation, including speaker gender, surrounding phonetic context, and the grammatical category of the lexical item containing /d/.