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

Corbet, James; Domínguez, Laura

doi:10.3390/languages5040046

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…These findings align with some previous studies on other areas of the Spanish inflectional system that have found a facilitative effect for age (Corbet and Domínguez 2020;Cuza and Miller 2015;Martinez-Nieto and Restrepo 2022;Montrul and Potowski 2007; see also Flores et al 2017 concerning European Portuguese HSs), which points to protracted HL development of inflectional morphology. These studies differ, however, from some previous work on child Spanish HSs that reports attrition of morphosyntactic structures (Goebel-Mahrle and Shin 2020; Merino 1983), as well as the predictions that Putnam and Sánchez (2013) advance, since it does not appear that bilingual children are restructuring their grammatical repertoire over time.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

On the Acquisition of Differential Object Marking in Child Heritage Spanish: Bilingual Education, Exposure, and Age Effects (In Memory of Phoebe Search)

Thane

2024

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Studies on school-aged children have been infrequent in research on Spanish as a heritage language. The present study explored how dual-language immersion education, patterns of heritage language use, proficiency, and age shape child Spanish heritage speakers’ production and selection of differential object marking (DOM). A total of 57 English–Spanish bilingual children and 18 Spanish-dominant adults completed sentence completion and morphology selection tasks. Results revealed that the group of heritage speaker children that produced and selected the differential object marker most frequently was the seventh and eighth grade children (ages 12–14, the oldest in the study) who had completed a dual-language immersion program. Different factors accounted for variability in each task: bilingual education and proficiency affected the production of DOM, while age affected selection. Heritage speakers selected DOM more frequently than they produced this structure. These findings have implications for theories of heritage language acquisition that emphasizes that language experience and exposure account for differences between heritage speakers and argue for the dissociation of production from underlying syntactic knowledge. The data also argue that heritage speakers may possess a bilingual alignment for DOM, whereby underlying receptive knowledge is modulated by cumulative exposure, while production depends more on bilingual education and proficiency in Spanish.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

On the Acquisition of Differential Object Marking in Child Heritage Spanish: Bilingual Education, Exposure, and Age Effects (In Memory of Phoebe Search)

Thane

2024

Languages

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“…Previous studies in adult heritage Russian in the US have reported vulnerability or loss of aspectual distinctions, which they mostly attribute to Attrition over the lifespan (e.g., Polinsky, 2008), the Bottleneck Hypothesis (e.g., Mikhaylova, 2018), and the Interface Hypothesis (e.g., Laleko, 2010). Moreover, studies on heritage Spanish in the US found inaccurate production of aspect, avoidance errors, and low accuracy which they attribute to Attrition and/or Incomplete Acquisition of aspect in Spanish (Cuza et al, 2013;Corbet & Dominguez, 2020;Montrul, 2002;Montrul & Perpiñan, 2011;van Buren, 2012) and an overuse of the perfective form which they attribute to cross-linguistic influence from English.…”

Section: Zooming In Minority Languages: Acquisition Of Aspect In Heri...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Aspect in Heritage Greek: evidence from elicited production and online judgments

Paspali

Rizou

Αλεξιαδου

2021

Applied Psycholinguistics

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This study tests grammatical aspect in adult Heritage Speakers (HSs) of Greek in Germany (HSs-Germany) and the US (HSs-US), a topic which has not been investigated before for this language, exploring the role of the dominant language and the default value as an acquisition strategy. In an oral elicitation task (Experiment 1) targeting the production of aspectual marking in Greek, Greek monolinguals (MSs) and HSs-Germany exhibited ceiling performance, while HSs-US were significantly less accurate. Education in Greek reliably predicted their accuracy. In a speeded Grammaticality Judgment task (Experiment 2) targeting the comprehension of aspect in a Grammaticality x Aspect repeated measures design, similar results were obtained for the grammatical conditions as in Experiment 1. In ungrammatical conditions, accuracy on aspect was affected for all groups, and this was more evident for HSs. HSs-US were overall less accurate with the morphologically marked form (perfective). Decision Times (DTs) revealed that only MSs and HSs-Germany were sensitive to aspect violations exhibiting longer DTs. Education in Greek reliably predicted accuracy and DTs. The results are discussed within the realm of heritage languages, language contact, and aspect acquisition in Greek bilingual populations. Finally, certain novel verbal forms produced by HSs are also discussed.

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School, age, and exposure effects in the child heritage language acquisition of the Spanish volitional subjunctive

Thane

2024

LAB

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The present study investigated the production and receptive knowledge of the Spanish subjunctive mood in volitional clauses by 57 English-dominant heritage speakers in fifth, seventh, and eighth grades (ages 10–14), some of whom were enrolled in a dual-language immersion program. Children’s self-reported frequency of use of Spanish affected command of this structure, and participants showed more consistent selection of the subjunctive than production of this form. There were no differences in production or selection between children in the dual-language immersion and monolingual English schools, but older children produced and selected the subjunctive more than younger participants. The lexical frequency of individual subordinate verbs did not affect subjunctive use. The role for frequency of use and asymmetrical performance between tasks support Putnam and Sánchez’s (2013) activation approach to heritage language acquisition. However, the absence of an effect for bilingual schooling or lexical frequency and the increased use of subjunctive mood with age do not strictly align with theories of a reassembly of features in heritage language acquisition, and argue for a protracted development of subjunctive mood in heritage Spanish.

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

Cited by 5 publications

References 41 publications

On the Acquisition of Differential Object Marking in Child Heritage Spanish: Bilingual Education, Exposure, and Age Effects (In Memory of Phoebe Search)

On the Acquisition of Differential Object Marking in Child Heritage Spanish: Bilingual Education, Exposure, and Age Effects (In Memory of Phoebe Search)

Aspect in Heritage Greek: evidence from elicited production and online judgments

School, age, and exposure effects in the child heritage language acquisition of the Spanish volitional subjunctive

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