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

Abstract

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.

Linguistic variation and grammatical complexity in child heritage speakers

“…The evidence presented in this paper suggests that school-age child HSs distinguish between human and nonhuman animate, specific DOs in their production of Spanish DOM. This does not mean that groups do not differ in the actual rates of DOM, in line with what previous studies looking at categorical (obligatory) contexts have reported (Cuza et al, 2019;Guijarro-Fuentes & Marinis, 2011;Montrul & Sánchez-Walker, 2013).…”

“…It has consistently been found that HSs omit DOM with animate direct objects (DOs) more than monolingual speakers and first-generation speakers (e.g., Montrul, 2004;Montrul & Bowles, 2009;Montrul & Sánchez-Walker, 2013;Montrul 2014). Evidence of child HSs has also found similar omission (Cuza et al, 2019;Guijarro-Fuentes & Marinis, 2011;Montrul & Sánchez-Walker, 2013). This suggests that DO animacy (as well as other related features of DOs) may not be such strong constraints on DOM use in HSs, in line with structural simplification accounts.…”

“…School-age HSs of Spanish tend to omit DOM more than monolingual peers (Montrul & Sánchez-Walker, 2013;Guijarro-Fuentes & Marinis, 2011) and more than their caregivers (Cuza et al, 2019). Montrul and Sánchez-Walker (2013) examined the acquisition of DOM in two groups of bilingual children (simultaneous and sequential) ages 6;0 -17;0 living in the U.S. and compared their performance to monolingual children living in Mexico.…”

“…For Spanish DOM, the question is whether child HSs learn the distinction between human and nonhuman animate DOs, consisting in greater marking with the former and more variation with the latter. While research with school-aged bilingual children reports differences from monolingual peers (e.g., Cuza et al, 2019;Guijarro-Fuentes & Marinis, 2011;Montrul & Sánchez-Walker, 2013), the literature has not examined whether bilingual children follow the animacy scale in distinguishing different types of animate DOs (i.e., human DOs from nonhuman animate DOs). Evidence of such knowledge could question the underspecification of the animacy constraint in child HSs and allow us to ask new questions as to the gradience of the differences between HS and monolingual or baseline grammars.…”

Spanish copula selection with adjectives in school-aged bilingual children

“…The picture becomes pellucid when we take into account the heterogeneity found in our child heritage speakers. Like prior research that found no effect of age on bilingual production of Spanish morphosyntax (Cuza et al, 2019), this study found no effect of age on task performance. Nor did we find an effect of English proficiency.…”