While heritage language phonology has attracted a great deal of attention, little is known about the development of heritage phonological grammars. This study examines the production of the Spanish trill /r/ by school-aged (9-10 years) and adult heritage speakers. Results showed that the adult heritage speakers produced the trill in a more target-like manner than the child heritage speakers, although half of them diverged from non-heritage native baselines reported in other studies. Further analysis of the distribution of trill variants suggests that heritage Spanish trill development occurs in the order of single lingual constriction → frication → multiple lingual constrictions. However, instead of abandoning variants of early stages, some adult heritage speakers kept them in their trill inventories, demonstrating increased variability. Our findings indicate that 9- to 10-year-old heritage speakers are still in the process of developing heritage phonological grammars and even during adulthood their grammars may not reach stability.

This study considers language dominance as a composite of proficiency, use, and input, and examines how these constructs in Spanish influence heritage speakers’ production of Spanish alveolar taps. Two aspects of Spanish tap production were examined: lingual constriction rates and the degree of lingual constriction. Multiple measures associated with Spanish proficiency, use, and input were reduced to a smaller number of dimensions using principal component analysis, and the effects of the components on heritage speakers’ tap production were analyzed using mixed effects modeling. The overall findings suggest that dominance in Spanish may not have an effect on the degree of lingual constriction of heritage speakers’ taps, but it does have an effect on how frequently heritage speakers produce taps with lingual constriction. Spanish use and input were found to be the main contributors to heritage speakers’ target-like production of taps.

The goal of this study is to highlight the importance of taking into account variations in monolingual grammars before discussing majority language influence as a possible source of heritage speakers’ divergent grammars. In this study, we examine the production of uptalk in Spanish by heritage speakers of Mexican Spanish in Southern California. Uptalk (i.e., rising intonation contour at the end of a non-question utterance) is frequently associated with California English. Thus, heritage speakers’ use of uptalk is often considered to be influenced from English intonation (i.e., the majority language). Although uptalk in Spanish is not well understood, it has been observed in Mexican Spanish, which calls attention to the importance of investigating uptalk in monolingual Spanish. Using a dyadic interaction task, we obtained spontaneous speech data of 16 heritage speakers and 16 monolingual speakers of Mexican Spanish and compared the phonological and phonetic properties of uptalks produced by the two groups. Our results demonstrated that the heritage speakers and the monolingual speakers produced uptalks with similar frequencies and mainly used L+H* HH% and L* HH% contours. However, the two groups had more differences than similarities. Specifically, heritage speakers’ uptalks presented less dynamic contours and were produced with flatter rises than monolinguals’ uptalks. Heritage speakers’ divergent patterns showed close resemblance with patterns in English, suggesting majority language influence as a valid source of divergence. We discuss possible avenues for future research for a better understanding of the role of majority language influence on heritage Spanish uptalk.

The Spanish voiced palatal obstruent /ʝ/ is orthographically represented as ⟨y⟩ or ⟨ll⟩. The most closely related sound in English is /j/, which is often written with ⟨y⟩, but produced with weaker constriction compared to the Spanish /ʝ/. Our goal is to examine influence from English (i.e., the majority language) in heritage speakers’ production of the Spanish /ʝ/ by testing the effect of orthography (i.e., whether stronger influence is found in ⟨y⟩ than in ⟨ll⟩). Heritage speech data were collected using a read-aloud task in which the stimuli varied in orthography, preceding vowel height, and stress condition. Results showed that heritage speakers predominantly produced the Spanish /ʝ/ as an English-like approximant [j], which was preferred even more when /ʝ/ was written with ⟨y⟩. However, the orthography effect surfaced only when the phonetic contexts did not favor strong constriction, suggesting that orthography-induced majority language influence is conditioned by universal phonetic principles.