A corpus study of child heritage speakers’ Spanish gender agreement

Abstract

Objectives: This study investigates (a) whether child heritage speakers produce more gender mismatches in Spanish ( un piedra “a-masc. stone-fem.”) than monolingual children, (b) whether older child heritage speakers mismatch more than younger ones, and (c) linguistic contexts in which mismatches occur. Methodology: 3893 agreement forms were extracted from corpora of Spanish spoken by six monolingual children, ages 5–6 years, and three groups of US child heritage speakers: ten 5–6-year-olds, fifteen 7–8-year-olds, and twenty-one 9–11-year-olds. Data and analysis: Logistic regressions measured the impact of agreement form type, noun gender, noncanonical noun ending, and noun frequency on gender matching. One regression included 5–6-year-olds only (monolingual and heritage); the second included child heritage speakers only (5–11-year-olds). Findings: There were no significant differences between monolingual and heritage 5–6-year-olds; for these children, adjectives, direct object clitics, noncanonical nouns, and feminine nouns increased the likelihood of mismatches. Among the 5–11-year-old heritage speakers, direct object clitics referring to feminine nouns and noncanonical nouns increased the likelihood of mismatches. The 9–11-year-olds produced more gender mismatches referring to feminine nouns than the younger child heritage speakers, especially with direct object clitics. Originality: This corpus study provides evidence for high rates of gender matching and clarifies the contexts that increase the likelihood that children will mismatch. Implications: Gender matching remains an intact part of child heritage speakers’ Spanish grammars. The distribution of mismatches found provides evidence of a strong article–noun association and a weaker noun–direct object clitic association. The oldest child heritage speakers’ use of masculine clitic lo to refer to feminine nouns may reflect an association between English “it” and Spanish lo. More generally, the finding that mismatches tend to involve masculine forms referring to feminine nouns supports the idea that masculine is the default, unmarked form in Spanish.

Gender in Unilingual and Mixed Speech of Spanish Heritage Speakers in The Netherlands

“…In addition, more errors were made with non-canonical nouns than with canonical nouns (cf. Alarcón 2011;van Osch et al 2014;Montrul et al 2008;Montrul et al 2014;Goebel-Mahrle and Shin 2020) and with the adjective than with the determiner (cf. Cuza and Pérez-Tattam 2016).…”

A triangulation study on gender agreement in Spanish by native Basque speakers

“…For consistency purposes, all the antecedents were accompanied by a determiner and words such as agua 'water' and alma 'soul' were excluded; despite being high frequency words according to the aforementioned dictionary, they are feminine nouns that in their singular form are accompanied by a masculine determiner for starting with an unstressed /a/ (Clegg, 2011). Also, for consistency, the antecedent and the blank space where the participants had to make their choice were distanced by a minimum of three and a maximum of five words (it is believed that the distance between nouns and adjectives increases the production of N-SGA, e.g., Goebel-Mahrle and Shin, 2020;Lipski, 2015;Ramírez Cruz, 2009). The results were coded by accuracy measurements, calculating the total number of instances that follow standard Spanish rules on GA.…”

“…rsel 52/1 • 2022 • pp. 7-37 • doi: https://doi.org/10.31810/rsel.52.1.1 (99,9%) of nouns ending in -o are masculine, while the majority (96,3%) ending in -a are feminine (Goebel-Mahrle and Shin, 2020;Roca, 1989;Teschner and Russell, 1984). These are nouns with canonical endings but there are also nouns with non-canonical endings: nouns that do not end with their expected gender vowel or those that end with consonants (Cruz Rico, 2021;Goebel-Mahrle and Shin, 2020;Roca, 1989).…”

“…7-37 • doi: https://doi.org/10.31810/rsel.52.1.1 (99,9%) of nouns ending in -o are masculine, while the majority (96,3%) ending in -a are feminine (Goebel-Mahrle and Shin, 2020;Roca, 1989;Teschner and Russell, 1984). These are nouns with canonical endings but there are also nouns with non-canonical endings: nouns that do not end with their expected gender vowel or those that end with consonants (Cruz Rico, 2021;Goebel-Mahrle and Shin, 2020;Roca, 1989). Nevertheless, it is also notable that it is common to have «difficulties» with the acquisition of gender on the L2 (Anderson, 1999;Cruz Rico et al, 2021;Husein, 2021), regardless of whether the L1 produces grammatical gender or not (Bruhn de Garavito and White, 2002).…”

Child Heritage Language Development: An Interplay Between Cross-Linguistic Influence and Language-External Factors

“…We used the term “child HL speakers,” but it should be noted that in previous research, the term “L1 development” in simultaneous or early sequential bilinguals has been used instead [for a detailed discussion on the terminology in HL and child bilingualism research see Kupisch and Rothman (Kupisch and Rothman, 2018 )]. Today, more and more studies use the term “child HL speakers” (e.g., Meir and Armon-Lotem, 2015 ; Cuza and Pérez-Tattam, 2016 ; Daskalaki et al, 2019 , 2020 ; Chondrogianni and Schwartz, 2020 ; Goebel-Mahrle and Shin, 2020 ; Rodina et al, 2020 ; Serratrice, 2020 ; Armon-Lotem et al, 2021 ; Otwinowska et al, 2021 ). Heritage language speakers acquire their HL from birth via naturalistic input, but as adults, they show divergence from the baseline (the language spoken in the country of origin, or the language spoken by the first generation of immigrants who are dominant in this language).…”