Language activation in dual language schools: the development of subject-verb agreement in the English and Spanish of heritage speaker children

Goldin, Michele

doi:10.1080/13670050.2021.2005529

Cited by 7 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 50 publications

(15 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Dual language immersion programs teach academic content such as math, science, reading and writing in English and a partner language, most frequently Spanish, given its prevalence in many U.S. communities. There are several studies that examine language acquisition in children attending Spanish-English immersion schools (Gathercole, 2002;Herschensohn et al, 2005;Potowski, 2005Potowski, , 2007aMontrul and Potowski, 2007;Fernández-Dobao andHerschensohn, 2020, 2021;Goldin, 2020Goldin, , 2021Sánchez et al, 2023), but few of them focus on the development of Spanish in bilingual children between 7-18 years old. Montrul (2018, p. 534) argues that bilinguals in this age span are the "missing link" of heritage language research, as they are essential to charting the path of acquisition between preschool, an age range for which there is more abundant research evidence from bilingual children, and adulthood, where HS frequently show grammatical innovations not found in monolingual grammars.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The comprehension of clitic gender in child heritage and second language Spanish: evidence from a dual language program

Austin,

Thane,

Rodríguez

et al. 2024

Front. Lang. Sci.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Despite the growth of dual-language programs in the United States, few studies have examined how children acquire Spanish through immersion. This article compares how heritage speakers (HS) and English-fluent Spanish L2 learners (L2L) immersed in Spanish comprehend gender in direct object clitics, an area of Spanish grammar prone to bilingual effects. A total of 78 English-dominant children enrolled in a dual language school participated in the experiment: 24 HS (6 in 2nd grade, 10 in 4th/5th grade, 8 in 7th/8th grade) and 54 L2L (16 in 2nd grade, 20 in 4th/5th grade, 18 in 7th/8th grade). Participants completed a forced-choice task which tested their ability to select target-like clitic gender after hearing sentences such as ‘La niña está tocando la guitarra (feminine). ¿Qué hace?' The girl is playing the guitar (feminine). What does she do? * ‘Lo toca' (masculine singular clitic)/ ‘La toca' (feminine singular clitic) She plays it. Results did not reveal any significant differences at the p < 0.05 level between the HS and L2L groups with accuracy in clitic gender. We found that in receptive knowledge of masculine clitic gender, the HS and L2L children had very similar scores in the 2nd grade and showed a similar improvement in accuracy by the 7th/8th grades. However, we did not find a similar pattern of growth in children's ability to select target-like feminine gender in either group. We discuss our findings and propose possible implications for immersion programs.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The comprehension of clitic gender in child heritage and second language Spanish: evidence from a dual language program

Austin,

Thane,

Rodríguez

et al. 2024

Front. Lang. Sci.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The L2 learners' ability to show sensitivity to such a violation became limited, particularly when multiple features unique to L2 were involved. L2 agreement processing may not be attained efficiently on the occasion that the grammaticalization of the agreement source is not L1-analogous (Goldin, 2021;Rattanasak et al, 2020). As a result, making form-meaning connections between the L2 number feature absent in the L1 in linguistically complex contexts could potentially be more cognitively taxing and therefore consume more cognitive resources (Austin et al, 2015;Sagarra, 2021;Warren & Gibson, 2002).…”

Section: The Nonnative Speakers' Agreement Processingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While cognitive resources were a key determinant in Experiment 1 because the learners with higher WM capacity showed heightened sensitivity, even in the processing of the more distant ORC-UG agreement dependency, this was less likely the case in Experiment 2, where successful resolution of agreement dependencies was observed only in the less distant SRC-UG agreement dependency condition. Essentially, in Experiment 2, maintaining multiple L2-based features required more cognitive resources and tended to pose more difficulties in agreement processing (Austin et al, 2015;Goldin, 2021;Warren & Gibson, 2002), which thus led to failure to incrementally utilize L2 morphosyntactic knowledge during online processing for comprehension, as evidenced by the L2 learners' lack of reading slowdowns in the long-distance ORC-UG condition in Experiment 2.…”

Section: Working Memory and L2 Agreement Processingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Nevertheless, in accordance with the non-selective perspectives in grammatical activation, it could be argued that the processing divergence found was not without recourse to the L1. Based on the differences in the manipulations of the linear distance, an alternative perspective is that when the learners' cognitive resources were depleted (i.e., upon resolving the filler-gap dependency in a long-distance ORC), they might have become unable to retrieve the number feature in the subject NPs due to morphological complexity of the subject NP agreement controllers (Goldin, 2021;Warren & Gibson, 2002). This view is in line with a recent study by Brehm et al (2019), who attest, "Processing both nouns and verbs is likely to require lexical retrieval, but the representations that retrieval operates upon could differ" (p. 3).…”

Section: The L1-l2 Structural Competition In L2 Agreement Processingmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Effects of working memory on structural competition in processing English present tense morphology by L1 Thai learners

Rattanasak

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In the course of second language (L2) acquisition, L2 grammatical processing is often found to be dissimilar to that of native speakers, and nonnative processing difficulties have been attributed to various sources. In the realms of agreement processing, whether both first language (L1) and L2 linguistic systems are co-activated simultaneously within a bilingual mind during grammatical processing remains an active question in language sciences. This study examined individual differences in terms of working memory capacity and distance-based complexity in L2 agreement processing. In two word-by-word self-paced reading experiments, a total of 80 agreement-lacking Thai learners of L2 English and 80 native speakers of English read sentences involving English subject-verb agreement dependencies in two distance conditions. Distance was manipulated based on the dependency locality theory (Gibson, 1998, 2000), using semantically reversible English relative clauses (e.g., *The guy [that _ knows the driver/that the driver knows _] want to buy a new car). Two explanatory variables were crossed in a 2 x 2 design: distance (short-distance subject-extracted relative clause (SRC) vs. long-distance object-extracted relative clause (ORC)) and grammaticality of the subject-verb agreement (grammatical vs. ungrammatical). Stimuli in Experiment 1 involved singular subjects while those in Experiment 2 contained plural subjects; each consisted of 20 sentences, half grammatical and half ungrammatical, along with 40 distractors. The self-paced reading experiments were designed using the E-Prime 3.0 software package. A complex reading span task was used as a measure of working memory capacity. LexTALE scores showed L2 English proficiency to be upper-intermediate. In Experiment 1, linear mixed-effects modeling revealed that the native speakers and L2 learners were sensitive to agreement violation in both short-distance SRC ungrammatical and long-distance ORC ungrammatical conditions, shown by reading slowdowns. Their ability to show and maintain their sensitivity was, however, modulated as a function of working memory capacity and distance-based complexity. In Experiment 2, linear mixed-effects modeling showed that unlike the native speakers, who were able to show and maintain their sensitivity in both distance conditions, higher-span L2 learners showed longer reading times which were observed only in the short-distance SRC ungrammatical condition. These findings indicated that nonnative sensitivity to L2 agreement violation tended to be modulated by individual differences in terms of working memory capacity and distance-based linguistic complexity, particularly in agreement processing that involved multiple unique-to-L2 features, i.e., plural and third-person singular morphology, in long-distance agreement dependencies. To account for L2 learners' agreement processing difficulties, the findings suggested that L2 learners may labor under parallel activation, whereby working memory capacity is insufficient to resolve long-distance agreement dependencies, where the linguistic environment was more complex, thus resulting in reduced sensitivity to L2 agreement violation. The research findings were congruent with the L1-L2 structural competition account (Austin et al., 2015; Trenkic et al., 2014; Trenkic & Pongpairoj, 2013).

show abstract

Frequency effects and aspect morphology with state verbs in heritage Spanish

Thane

2023

LAB

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A total of 54 HS and 17 Spanish-dominant participants completed an elicited production task (EPT) and a forced choice task (FCT) to explore how proficiency, frequency of use, age of acquisition of English, morphological regularity, and lexical frequency affected their production and selection of preterit morphology with states. Results showed that HS’ production of preterit with states was negatively correlated with lexical frequency, such that these bilinguals were more likely to use the preterit with less-frequent verbs. Higher-proficiency speakers were less susceptible to the effects of lexical frequency in production. In contrast, proficiency modulated HS’ responses in the FCT. HS were more likely to select the preterit in the FCT than to produce it in the EPT. Together, these results support theories of heritage language acquisition that emphasize the role of activation of linguistic features and asymmetries between production and comprehension.

show abstract

Language activation in dual language schools: the development of subject-verb agreement in the English and Spanish of heritage speaker children

Cited by 7 publications

References 50 publications

The comprehension of clitic gender in child heritage and second language Spanish: evidence from a dual language program

The comprehension of clitic gender in child heritage and second language Spanish: evidence from a dual language program

Effects of working memory on structural competition in processing English present tense morphology by L1 Thai learners

Frequency effects and aspect morphology with state verbs in heritage Spanish

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About