Spanish heritage speakers in the Netherlands: Linguistic patterns in the judgment and production of mood

Abstract

Purpose: This study investigates heritage speakers of Spanish in the Netherlands regarding their knowledge of Spanish mood. Previous research has demonstrated that heritage speakers of Spanish in the US have problems with mood, especially subjunctive mood and particularly in contexts where choice of mood is variable and depends on semantic and pragmatic factors. Moreover, heritage speakers are often reported to experience fewer problems with oral production tasks tapping into implicit knowledge than with judgment tasks targeting metalinguistic knowledge. This study aims to investigate whether these patterns can be confirmed for heritage speakers of Spanish in the Netherlands. Methodology: In all, 17 heritage speakers from the Netherlands and 18 monolingual speakers of Spanish completed a contextualized elicited production task. Each item contained a context targeting either indicative or subjunctive mood. Below each context followed the beginning of a sentence which the participants were instructed to complete. Both obligatory and variable uses of mood were included. The results were compared to findings from a contextualized scalar acceptability judgment task described in an earlier study using the same conditions and the same participants. Data and analysis: All responses were coded as felicitous or infelicitous given the accompanying context and were analyzed using mixed effects modeling. The results demonstrate that the heritage speakers are less accurate in their choice of mood than monolingual speakers, particularly on subjunctive mood and in variable contexts. Furthermore, heritage speakers deviated more from the monolingual patterns in the production task than in the judgment task. Findings/conclusion: These results confirm several patterns attested for heritage speakers of Spanish in the US, namely the increased vulnerability of subjunctive mood and in contexts where mood is not obligatorily selected. However, in contrast to previous literature, this study reports better performance on a metalinguistic judgment task than on an oral production task. This finding is attributed to differences in societal circumstances between both heritage speaker populations. Implications of the research: This study confirms the heterogeneity of heritage speakers as a population and emphasizes the importance of taking societal circumstances into consideration.

Implicit and Explicit Knowledge of a Multiple Interface Phenomenon: Differential Task Effects in Heritage Speakers and L2 Speakers of Spanish in The Netherlands

“…In the present paper, we focus on a multiple interface phenomenon: the subjunctive in syntactically, semantically and pragmatically constrained contexts. The results for the heritage speakers have been reported elsewhere (Van Osch and Sleeman 2016;Van Osch et al 2017). In this paper, these findings are compared to results by L2 speakers on the same tasks.…”

Lexical frequency and morphological regularity as sources of heritage speaker variability in the acquisition of mood

“…In general, adult HSs of Spanish tend to exhibit considerable rates of optionality in their interpretation and use of indicative and subjunctive in a wide range of structures, affecting contexts that allow for mood alternations more prominently (see, amongst others, Giancaspro, 2017, 2019; Martinez-Mira, 2006; Mikulski, 2006; Perez-Cortes, 2016; Silva-Corvalán, 1994, 2003; Viner, 2018). While lexically-selected complements appear to favor the emergence of subjunctive forms (Montrul, 2007; Van Osch and Sleeman, 2018), constructions featuring mood alternations based on semantic/pragmatic grounds – such as the one examined in this study – show the highest percentages of morphological optionality (Iverson et al, 2008; Montrul, 2009, 2011).…”

The Late(r) Bird Gets the Verb? Effects of Age of Acquisition of English on Adult Heritage Speakers’ Knowledge of Subjunctive Mood in Spanish

“…With this broader purpose in mind, the present study sets out to evaluate the role of two related factors-age of acquisition of the societal language (English) and heritage language proficiency-in shaping (adult) HSs' productive and receptive knowledge of mood morphology in Spanish. Though many recent studies (e.g., Giancaspro 2017Giancaspro , 2019Montrul 2009;Montrul and Perpiñán 2011;Van Osch and Sleeman 2018;Perez-Cortes 2016;Torres 2018;Viner 2016Viner , 2017Viner , 2018; inter alia) have investigated HSs' production and comprehension of subjunctive mood in Spanish, none of these studies (to my knowledge) has compared the subjunctive mood competence of HSs with earlier and later ages of acquisition of the societal language, respectively. Furthermore, out of the few previous studies (Giancaspro 2019;Montrul 2009;Montrul and Perpiñán 2011;Perez-Cortes 2016) that have tested the impact of Spanish proficiency on HSs' subjunctive knowledge, none that I am aware of has controlled for participants' age of acquisition of English, raising questions about whether the proficiency effects that have been observed are driven (at least in part) by this second variable.…”