Chapter 9. The development of tense and aspect morphology in child and adult heritage speakers

Cuza, Alejandro; Pérez-Tattam, Rocío; Barajas, Elizabeth; Miller, Lauren; Sadowski, Claudia

doi:10.1075/lllt.38.12cuz

Cited by 19 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…Furthermore, we expect older children to show more difficulties than younger children due to their more extended exposure to English and consequent less exposure to Spanish at home. Cuza, Pérez-Tattam, Barajas, Miller, & Sadowski (2013) found an overextension of the preterite and present tense forms among older Spanish–English bilingual children in spontaneous production. The older the children were, the more difficulties they had with their spontaneous production of preterite versus imperfect distinctions, and the more they diverged from younger children, their parents and monolingual children.…”

Section: The Acquisition Of Dom In Spanishmentioning

confidence: 81%

Structure complexity effects in child heritage Spanish: The case of the Spanish personala

Cuza

Miller

Tattam

et al. 2018

International Journal of Bilingualism

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Aims and objectives: This study examines the acquisition of Differential Object Marking (DOM) in heritage Spanish children born in the USA and the potential role of structure complexity and chronological age. Design: Bilingual children were compared with monolingual children matched by age and long-term immigrants (children’s parents) via an Elicited Production task. We elicited the distribution of personal a in simple and Clitic Left Dislocated (CLLD) structures. Data and analysis: Results were entered into repeated analyses of variance measure with type of structure and group as dependent variables and chronological age as a covariate. Conclusions: Results show decreased production of personal a among the bilingual children, especially in CLLD contexts. We also found strong correlations between target use and type of structure, but no correlations with developmental age among the bilingual children. Parents and monolingual children behaved at ceiling with matrix questions but showed variable behavior with CLLD structures. We argue for incomplete specification of the animacy and specificity features constraining DOM and structure complexity effects affecting child bilingual grammars. Originality: This study highlights that heritage speakers do not necessarily become less native-like with age and increased exposure to English. The comparison of the bilingual children to both monolingual children and their parents was essential to mitigate the effects of dialect and cognitive development. Implications: Given that age was not the determining factor in bilingual children’s production of DOM in Spanish, it would seem that exposure to and use of the heritage language play a larger role. Additionally, for theories of language acquisition, these findings suggest that an early age of onset of acquisition is not a sufficient condition for native-like attainment, especially when input is lacking.

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Section: The Acquisition Of Dom In Spanishmentioning

confidence: 81%

Structure complexity effects in child heritage Spanish: The case of the Spanish personala

Cuza

Miller

Tattam

et al. 2018

International Journal of Bilingualism

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“…Chi-squared tests also revealed that the younger children produced significantly fewer preterite and imperfect contexts than the older children did. Cuza et al (2013) argue that their results indicate that heritage speakers' knowledge of the preterite may be attrited, as the older children had increased their use of this form, but the use of the preterite had reduced again for the adult heritage speakers. Conversely, the fact that the overall proportion of imperfect used in the narrative does not increase with age across the bilingual groups suggests that their competence with the imperfect may not increase at all.…”

Section: Viewpoint Aspect In Spanish Heritage Speakersmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…Consequently, she also argues that this simplification of the Spanish verbal system results from an interrupted acquisition process resulting from reduced Spanish input in childhood (Silva-Corvalán 2003, p. 393). Cuza et al (2013) used Little Red Riding Hood narrative prompts with child and adult heritage speakers. Seven children between ages 5;0-7;4, six children aged 8;1-9;11, and eleven adult heritage speakers took part in the study, and monolingual child and adult controls were taken from the CHILDES database, which used the Frog story (Mayer 1969).…”

Section: Viewpoint Aspect In Spanish Heritage Speakersmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Comprehension of Tense–Aspect Morphology by Spanish Heritage Speakers in the United Kingdom

Corbet

Domínguez

2020

Languages

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Whilst heritage Spanish has been widely examined in the USA, less is known about the acquisition of Spanish in other English-dominant contexts such as the UK, and studies rarely assess the baseline grammar that heritage speakers are exposed to directly. In this study, we implemented a semantic interpretation task to 17 bilinguals in the UK to investigate child heritage speakers’ and their parents’ comprehension of the preterite–imperfect aspectual contrast in Spanish, an area of known difficulty. The results show that the parents are consistently more accurate in accepting and rejecting the appropriate morphemes than the children. Further analysis shows that children’s accuracy was best predicted by age at time of testing, suggesting that young heritage speakers of Spanish in the UK can acquire the target grammar. However, this general increase in accuracy with age was not found for the continuous reading of imperfective aspect. This finding implicates a more nuanced role of cross-linguistic influence in early heritage speakers’ grammar(s), and partially explains greater difficulty with the imperfect observed in production studies with other heritage speakers.

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“…This is complicated by the lack of gender features and contrasting phrasal word order in English, which could lead to potential cross-linguistic influence effects (Hulk & Müller, 2000;Liceras, Fernández Fuertes, Perales, Pérez-Tattam & Spradlin, 2008;Paradis & Genesee, 1996;Pérez-Leroux, Cuza & Thomas, 2011), as well as by the existence of prenominal adjective position in Spanish, which provides ambiguous input. The acquisition process among young bilingual children is further affected by reduced exposure and use of Spanish as a minority language in the American context, where English is both the dominant societal language and the language of formal instruction (Cuza, Pérez-Tattam, Barajas, Miller & Sadowski, 2013).…”

Section: Gender Concord In Spanish and Englishmentioning

confidence: 99%

Grammatical gender selection and phrasal word order in child heritage Spanish: A feature re-assembly approach

Cuza

Pérez-Tattam²

2015

Bilingualism

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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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Chapter 9. The development of tense and aspect morphology in child and adult heritage speakers

Abstract: 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.

Cited by 19 publications

References 28 publications

Structure complexity effects in child heritage Spanish: The case of the Spanish personala

Structure complexity effects in child heritage Spanish: The case of the Spanish personala

The Comprehension of Tense–Aspect Morphology by Spanish Heritage Speakers in the United Kingdom

Grammatical gender selection and phrasal word order in child heritage Spanish: A feature re-assembly approach

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