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The present study examines the development of grammatical gender assignment, agreement, and noun-adjective word order in child heritage Spanish among thirty-two Spanish–English bilingual children born and raised in the United States. A picture-naming task revealed significant overextension of the masculine form and high levels of ungrammatical word order strings. There were no significant differences by age regarding gender concord or noun-adjective word order. We argue that the differences found can be accounted for in terms of a re-assembly of gender features leading to both morphological and syntactic variability. This approach allows for subsequent morphosyntactic shifts during early childhood depending on patterns of language use, and conceptualizes heritage language variation along the lines of current linguistic theorizing regarding the role of innate linguistic principles and language experience in language development.

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Frank for their assistance with different aspects of this project. We are also extremely grateful to the two anonymous reviewers and to the two series editors for their thorough comments and helpful feedback.

This study examines possible semantic interaction in fully fluent adult simultaneous and early L2 bilinguals. Monolingual and bilingual speakers of Spanish and English (N=144) were tested for their understanding of lexical categories that differed in their two languages. Simultaneous bilinguals came from homes in which Spanish or Spanish and English were spoken when they were children, and L2 bilinguals entered the US as children. Accuracy data show higher ultimate attainment of languagespecific semantic knowledge in English than in Spanish, but in both languages the interaction of the semantic categories with conceptual knowledge is observable. The data reveal subtle differences in early bilinguals' extensions of words, but only in some types of categories, and modified by level of proficiency. SEMANTIC AND CONCEPTUAL FACTORS IN SPANISH-ENGLISH BILINGUALS' PROCESSING OF LEXICAL CATEGORIES IN THEIR TWO LANGUAGESThe question of convergence between a bilingual's languages has long been of interest, with the focus on a wide range of linguistic areas, including phonology, morphosyntax, and syntax. Recently, the interest in how bilinguals represent the semantics of their languages and how the semantic systems relate to conceptual understanding has intensified. We provide further evidence here on such issues from a population of fully-fluent adult simultaneous and early-L2 bilinguals. The data provide evidence on the ultimate attainment of language-specific semantic knowledge, the potential long-term convergence of the semantic systems, and the role of cognitive knowledge (i.e., knowledge of the world independent of language) in such convergence. BACKGROUNDIn this work, we use the term semantic to refer to the language-specific ways in which meaning is encoded in language. No two languages carve up the semantic space in identical fashion (Jarvis and Pavlenko, 2008; Malt, Gennari, Imai, Ameel, Saji, and Majid, in press), so how do bilingual speakers manage differences between their two languages? Non-isomorphic relations between words in the two languages are common and pervasive: A word in one language can have more than one translation equivalent in the other (Spanish dedo -English finger, toe), the categories can cross-cut each other (as in the case of Korean verbs of placement distinguishing acts according to the tight or loose fit of the objects, versus the English focus on containment versus support, Bowerman and Choi, 2001), or a category in one language may be absent in the other (English nut has no generic equivalent in Spanish) (Elston-Güttler and Williams, 2008;Prior, Kroll and MacWhinney, 2013;Prior, MacWhinney, and Kroll, 2007;Tokowicz, Kroll, De Groot, and Van Hell, 2002).Corresponding to these differences in inter-language lexical correspondences, the internal semantics of words can vary dramatically, both across languages and within a language. On one end of the continuum some words can be relatively homogeneous/consistent in application, in that members in the category share necessary and sufficient con...

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