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Contemporary Advances in Linguistic Research on Heritage Spanish
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Contemporary Advances in Linguistic Research on Heritage Spanish

A special issue of Languages (ISSN 2226-471X).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 August 2020) | Viewed by 38764

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Bradley Hoot

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Modern Languages, DePaul University, Schmitt Academic Center 334, Chicago, IL 60614, USA
Interests: bilingualism; information structure; code-switching; linguistic theory; heritage languages; language acquisition

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

In the last decade, research on heritage languages has enjoyed unprecedented prominence. Researchers from across linguistics and related fields have increasingly agreed that data from heritage speakers are crucial for understanding bilinguals and bilingualism more generally, providing key insights for linguistic theory, language acquisition, and psycholinguistics alike.

Within this work, research on Spanish has played a special role. Given the preeminent position of Spanish among minority languages in the United States as well as its global presence, heritage Spanish is among the most well-studied heritage languages. Many insights into the nature of heritage language grammars have emerged from studies of Spanish (including seminal work by Montrul, Rothman, and others), and Spanish will continue to be central to understanding heritage languages and their acquisition.

As research on heritage languages has expanded, the field has arrived at a pivotal moment: time to take stock, consolidate what we know, and identify what remains to be done. To that end, several recent publications (e.g., Montrul, 2016; Polinsky, 2018; Polinsky and Scontras, 2019, 2020; Potowski, 2018) have reviewed the state of the science and outlined future avenues for research. In this landscape, the time is right to consider how new research on Spanish as a heritage language can take those next steps.

The purpose of this Special Issue is to bring together innovative work on Spanish as a heritage language, with the aim of contributing to the next phase of research on heritage languages and their acquisition. Of course, we acknowledge the long history of innovation in this field; the topics highlighted below are not meant to imply that no such previous work exists but rather to identify areas we view as particularly ripe for additional contributions based on calls in the literature. With this in mind, we especially welcome papers that address one or more of the following topics with data from Spanish.

  1. The grammatical architecture of heritage languages
    • Areas where heritage grammars are resilient and their implications. That is, what do heritage speakers maintain from the baseline and why?
    • Areas of divergence from the baseline. For example, what are the implications for understanding heritage language acquisition and competence of the fact that certain parts of the grammar (e.g., inflectional morphology, long-distance dependencies, or non-canonical word orders) are especially likely to diverge from the baseline?
    • Constraints on sources of divergence from the baseline: For instance, what limits or promotes transfer or cross-linguistic influence between heritage speakers’ grammatical systems? What factors constrain acquisition of particular features?
    • Connecting heritage languages to general models of knowledge and acquisition. What can comparing heritage speakers to other populations (L2 learners, adult sequential bilinguals undergoing attrition, monolingual speakers, child 2L1 acquisition, “returnees”) reveal about the nature of language representation and acquisition?
  2. Variation among heritage speakers and factors “leading to, arising from, and constraining variation” (Polinsky and Scontras, 2019, p. 51)
    • Variation in the quality and quantity of input and its outcomes. We know heritage speakers are exposed to reduced and variable input; how can we trace the effects of the properties of the input to the eventual outcomes? What features are especially vulnerable to limitations in input?
    • Thresholds for acquisition. For example, in a language minority situation in which input is limited and in competition with the majority language, how much input is necessary to acquire a given linguistic property in the heritage language as a child or maintain it as an adult? How do different linguistic properties vary in this regard? How frequent does something need to be in the input to be acquirable in heritage language contexts?
    • Variation in the baseline (rather than the input). When Spanish is a minority language, the input to which heritage speakers are exposed may not only be limited in scope but may also include features of contact between different communities and other types of variation among the baseline speakers themselves. How does dialectal (or other) variation in the baseline affect heritage language acquisition? For example, how does the widespread dialect contact in Spanish in the United States affect acquisition of Spanish as a heritage language?
  3. New sources of data
    • Data documenting the input that heritage speakers receive during development, including corpora of child-directed speech and studies that examine the frequency of linguistic structures in the input heritage speakers are exposed to.
    • Data from both of heritage speakers’ languages (dominant and heritage), investigating bidirectional cross-linguistic influence.
    • Data from heritage speakers across the lifespan, especially from older speakers.
    • Longitudinal data tracing heritage language development or disentangling proposed causes of heritage language outcomes (such as attrition versus divergent acquisition).
    • Data comparing heritage Spanish and heritage speakers of other languages on the same linguistic phenomena.
    • Data from heritage speakers of Spanish in contexts other than the United States and with dominant languages other than English.
    • Methodological innovations in studying heritage speaker grammars, including novel data elicitation techniques, measures of real-time language processing, and methodological triangulation across multiple tasks.

We welcome papers with data from heritage Spanish from a range of approaches—including those employing formal, experimental, variationist and/or other paradigms—addressing these and related topics within the context of recent overviews of heritage language competence and acquisition.

We request that interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 400-600 words summarizing their intended contribution, prior to preparing their manuscripts. Abstracts will be reviewed by the guest editor and the journal's editorial team for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the special issue, and then full manuscripts will be solicited. Please send the abstract to [email protected] and [email protected]

The deadline for abstract submission is 15 April 2020.

The deadline for manuscript submission is 31 August 2020.

References

Montrul, S. (2016). The acquisition of heritage languages. Cambridge University Press.

Polinsky, M. (2018). Heritage Languages and Their Speakers. Cambridge University Press. https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.1017/9781107252349

Polinsky, M., & Scontras, G. (2019). Understanding heritage languages. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1–17. https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.1017/S1366728919000245

Polinsky, M., & Scontras, G. (2020). A roadmap for heritage language research. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 23(1), 50–55. https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.1017/S1366728919000555

Potowski, K. (Ed.). (2018). The Routledge handbook of Spanish as a heritage language. Routledge.

Dr. Bradley Hoot
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Languages is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • Spanish as a heritage language
  • Heritage language acquisition
  • Heritage language representation
  • Architecture of heritage language grammars
  • Divergence/convergence from the baseline
  • Variation
  • Methodological innovation
  • New sources of data

Published Papers (13 papers)

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Research

22 pages, 6529 KiB  
Article
An Examination of Social, Phonetic, and Lexical Variables on the Lenition of Intervocalic Voiced Stops by Spanish Heritage Speakers
by Kaylyn Blair and Sarah Lease
Languages 2021, 6(2), 108; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/languages6020108 - 17 Jun 2021
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2921
Abstract
The lenition of Spanish intervocalic voiced stops, commonly grouped as /bdg/, has increasingly been examined within Spanish as a Heritage Language research. This study seeks to identify social, phonetic, and lexical factors that predict the degree of lenition of /bdg/ among heritage speakers [...] Read more.
The lenition of Spanish intervocalic voiced stops, commonly grouped as /bdg/, has increasingly been examined within Spanish as a Heritage Language research. This study seeks to identify social, phonetic, and lexical factors that predict the degree of lenition of /bdg/ among heritage speakers of Spanish. We analyzed 850 intervocalic productions of /bdg/ by 20 adult Spanish heritage speakers of various generations in an oral word list production task. Using spectrographic analyses, productions were categorized as full approximant, tense approximant, and occlusive. Results from linear mixed-effects models indicated that the phonetic context and the number of family generations residing in the US significantly predicted the degree of lenition of intervocalic voiced segments while age of acquisition of Spanish, current contact hours, and cognate status did not predict changes in the degree of lenition. Specifically, as the speaker’s number of family generations residing in the US increased, fewer segments were lenited. We conclude that variations in /bdg/ lenition among heritage speakers of Spanish reflect the changes in pronunciation of other segments of heritage speakers over generations. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Contemporary Advances in Linguistic Research on Heritage Spanish)
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27 pages, 5455 KiB  
Article
Keeping a Critical Eye on Majority Language Influence: The Case of Uptalk in Heritage Spanish
by Ji Young Kim and Gemma Repiso-Puigdelliura
Languages 2021, 6(1), 13; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/languages6010013 - 12 Jan 2021
Cited by 6 | Viewed by 2874
Abstract
The goal of this study is to highlight the importance of taking into account variations in monolingual grammars before discussing majority language influence as a possible source of heritage speakers’ divergent grammars. In this study, we examine the production of uptalk in Spanish [...] Read more.
The goal of this study is to highlight the importance of taking into account variations in monolingual grammars before discussing majority language influence as a possible source of heritage speakers’ divergent grammars. In this study, we examine the production of uptalk in Spanish by heritage speakers of Mexican Spanish in Southern California. Uptalk (i.e., rising intonation contour at the end of a non-question utterance) is frequently associated with California English. Thus, heritage speakers’ use of uptalk is often considered to be influenced from English intonation (i.e., the majority language). Although uptalk in Spanish is not well understood, it has been observed in Mexican Spanish, which calls attention to the importance of investigating uptalk in monolingual Spanish. Using a dyadic interaction task, we obtained spontaneous speech data of 16 heritage speakers and 16 monolingual speakers of Mexican Spanish and compared the phonological and phonetic properties of uptalks produced by the two groups. Our results demonstrated that the heritage speakers and the monolingual speakers produced uptalks with similar frequencies and mainly used L+H* HH% and L* HH% contours. However, the two groups had more differences than similarities. Specifically, heritage speakers’ uptalks presented less dynamic contours and were produced with flatter rises than monolinguals’ uptalks. Heritage speakers’ divergent patterns showed close resemblance with patterns in English, suggesting majority language influence as a valid source of divergence. We discuss possible avenues for future research for a better understanding of the role of majority language influence on heritage Spanish uptalk. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Contemporary Advances in Linguistic Research on Heritage Spanish)
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29 pages, 2111 KiB  
Article
Auditory Processing of Gender Agreement across Relative Clauses by Spanish Heritage Speakers
by Daniel Vergara and Gilda Socarrás
Languages 2021, 6(1), 8; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/languages6010008 - 31 Dec 2020
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2111
Abstract
Processing research on Spanish gender agreement has focused on L2 learners’ and—to a lesser extent—heritage speakers’ sensitivity to gender agreement violations. This research has been mostly carried out in the written modality, which places heritage speakers at a disadvantage as they are more [...] Read more.
Processing research on Spanish gender agreement has focused on L2 learners’ and—to a lesser extent—heritage speakers’ sensitivity to gender agreement violations. This research has been mostly carried out in the written modality, which places heritage speakers at a disadvantage as they are more frequently exposed to Spanish auditorily. This study contributes to the understanding of the differences between heritage and L2 grammars by examining the processing of gender agreement in the auditory modality and its impact on comprehension. Twenty Spanish heritage speakers and 20 intermediate L2 learners listened to stimuli containing two nouns with gender mismatches in the main clause, and an adjective in the relative clause that only agreed in gender with one of the nouns. We measured noun-adjective agreement accuracy through participants’ responses to an auditory task. Our results show that heritage speakers are more accurate than L2 learners in the auditory processing of gender agreement information for comprehension. Additionally, heritage speakers’ accuracy is modulated by their Spanish language proficiency and age of onset. Participants also exhibit higher accuracies in cases in which the adjective agrees with the first noun. We argue that this is an ambiguity resolution strategy influenced by the experimental task. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Contemporary Advances in Linguistic Research on Heritage Spanish)
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41 pages, 4758 KiB  
Article
Language Experience Affects Comprehension of Spanish Passive Clauses: A Study of Heritage Speakers and Second Language Learners
by Noelia Sánchez Walker and Silvina Montrul
Languages 2021, 6(1), 2; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/languages6010002 - 22 Dec 2020
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 3066
Abstract
Heritage language (HL) learners of Spanish have shown better command with early acquired aspects of grammar than second language (L2) learners, mainly in oral tasks. This study investigates whether this advantage persists with passive clauses, structures acquired early but mastered during the school-age [...] Read more.
Heritage language (HL) learners of Spanish have shown better command with early acquired aspects of grammar than second language (L2) learners, mainly in oral tasks. This study investigates whether this advantage persists with passive clauses, structures acquired early but mastered during the school-age years, with literacy. We examined adjectival passives (La comida estaba servida, “Dinner was served”) with the copula estar in the imperfect, which refer to a description of a state or a final result; and verbal passives with the copula ser in the imperfect (La comida era servida. “Dinner was being served”), which refer to an ongoing or habitual action in the past. A grammaticality judgment task (GJT) testing knowledge of the copulas in different simple sentences and a picture-matching task (PMT) testing the comprehension of the two passive clauses revealed that HL learners’ knowledge of the copulas resembles that of literate monolingually raised native speakers more than that of L2 learners. HL learners are able to integrate their knowledge of the copulas to comprehend syntactically complex clauses, especially in the aural modality. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Contemporary Advances in Linguistic Research on Heritage Spanish)
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37 pages, 7385 KiB  
Article
The Sound Pattern of Heritage Spanish: An Exploratory Study on the Effects of a Classroom Experience
by Rajiv Rao, Zuzanna Fuchs, Maria Polinsky and María Luisa Parra
Languages 2020, 5(4), 72; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/languages5040072 - 18 Dec 2020
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2817
Abstract
While heritage Spanish phonetics and phonology and classroom experiences have received increased attention in recent years, these areas have yet to converge. Furthermore, most research in these realms is cross-sectional, ignoring individual or group changes across time. We aim to connect research strands [...] Read more.
While heritage Spanish phonetics and phonology and classroom experiences have received increased attention in recent years, these areas have yet to converge. Furthermore, most research in these realms is cross-sectional, ignoring individual or group changes across time. We aim to connect research strands and fill gaps associated with the aforementioned areas by conducting an individual-level empirical analysis of narrative data produced by five female heritage speakers of Spanish at the beginning and end of a semester-long heritage language instruction class. We focus on voiced and voiceless stop consonants, vowel quality, mean pitch, pitch range, and speech rate. Our acoustic and statistical outputs of beginning versus end data reveal that each informant exhibits a change in between three and five of the six dependent variables, showing that exposure to a more formal register through a classroom experience over the course of a semester constitutes enough input to influence the heritage language sound system, even if the sound system is not an object of explicit instruction. We interpret the significant changes through the lenses of the development of formal speech and discursive strategies, phonological retuning, and speech style and pragmatic effects, while also acknowledging limitations to address in future related work. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Contemporary Advances in Linguistic Research on Heritage Spanish)
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35 pages, 3387 KiB  
Article
Gender in Unilingual and Mixed Speech of Spanish Heritage Speakers in The Netherlands
by Ivo Boers, Bo Sterken, Brechje van Osch, M. Carmen Parafita Couto, Janet Grijzenhout and Deniz Tat
Languages 2020, 5(4), 68; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/languages5040068 - 04 Dec 2020
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 3577
Abstract
This study examines heritage speakers of Spanish in The Netherlands regarding their production of gender in both their languages (Spanish and Dutch) as well as their gender assignment strategies in code-switched constructions. A director-matcher task was used to elicit unilingual and mixed speech [...] Read more.
This study examines heritage speakers of Spanish in The Netherlands regarding their production of gender in both their languages (Spanish and Dutch) as well as their gender assignment strategies in code-switched constructions. A director-matcher task was used to elicit unilingual and mixed speech from 21 participants (aged 8 to 52, mean = 17). The nominal domain consisting of a determiner, noun, and adjective was targeted in three modes: (i) Unilingual Spanish mode, (ii) unilingual Dutch mode, and (iii) code-switched mode in both directions (Dutch to Spanish and Spanish to Dutch). The production of gender in both monolingual modes was deviant from the respective monolingual norms, especially in Dutch, the dominant language of the society. In the code-switching mode, evidence was found for the gender default strategy (common in Dutch, masculine in Spanish), the analogical gender strategy (i.e., the preference to assign the gender of the translation equivalent) as well as two thus far unattested strategies involving a combination of a default gender and the use of a non-prototypical word order. External factors such as age of onset of bilingualism, amount of exposure and use of both languages had an effect on both gender accuracy in the monolingual modes and assignment strategies in the code-switching modes. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Contemporary Advances in Linguistic Research on Heritage Spanish)
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25 pages, 1128 KiB  
Article
The Effect of Silence and Distance: Evidence from Recomplementation in US Heritage Spanish
by Joshua Frank
Languages 2020, 5(4), 66; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/languages5040066 - 24 Nov 2020
Viewed by 2192
Abstract
The present study investigates the architecture of heritage language grammars, as well as divergence from the baseline, by offering novel data. Recomplementation is defined as a left-dislocated phrase sandwiched between a primary (C1) and an optional secondary (C2) complementizer, e.g., He said that [...] Read more.
The present study investigates the architecture of heritage language grammars, as well as divergence from the baseline, by offering novel data. Recomplementation is defined as a left-dislocated phrase sandwiched between a primary (C1) and an optional secondary (C2) complementizer, e.g., He said that1later in the afternoon that2he would clean his room. While formal syntactic-theoretical accounts align on the grammaticality of recomplementation, experimental findings suggest that the overt C2 option is associated with a decrement in acceptability. An aural acceptability judgment task and a forced-choice preference task were administered in Spanish to 15 advanced US heritage speakers of Spanish (HS) and 12 members of a Colombian Spanish baseline group. Results show that HSs do not rate the overt C2 construction with a decrement in acceptability when compared to the null one. This behavior, along with a higher proportion of overt C2 preference, diverges from the baseline. In line with the Model of Divergent Attainment, we argue that the complexity associated with silent elements and dependency distance combined with processing burden leads to a reanalysis of the linguistic phenomenon. We introduce a multiple representations proposal that accurately describes the data in question and is faithful to current syntactic-theoretical accounts. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Contemporary Advances in Linguistic Research on Heritage Spanish)
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26 pages, 974 KiB  
Article
The Syntactic Distribution of Object Experiencer Psych Verbs in Heritage Spanish
by Becky Halloran Gonzalez
Languages 2020, 5(4), 63; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/languages5040063 - 17 Nov 2020
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 3332
Abstract
This paper contributes to our understanding of the grammatical architecture of heritage languages and, specifically, the role of lexical semantics, by examining the syntactic distribution of Spanish psych verbs. Object experiencer psych verbs in Spanish fall into two classes: Class II (e.g., molestar [...] Read more.
This paper contributes to our understanding of the grammatical architecture of heritage languages and, specifically, the role of lexical semantics, by examining the syntactic distribution of Spanish psych verbs. Object experiencer psych verbs in Spanish fall into two classes: Class II (e.g., molestar “to bother”) and Class III (e.g., encantar “to love”). Class II verbs allow numerous syntactic alternations, while Class III verbs are more restricted syntactically. The asymmetry under investigation here is attributed to a lexical semantic featural difference—Class II verbs can be [±change of state], while Class III verbs are always [−change of state]. Two groups of HSs, (intermediate (n = 21) and advanced (n = 18)), and a group of Spanish dominant bilinguals (n = 19) completed two judgment tasks, a standard proficiency measure, a vocabulary task, and a biographical questionnaire. Results reveal that the responses of both HS groups are consistent with the Spanish dominant bilinguals in nearly all conditions, indicating that HSs are highly sensitive to this syntactic distribution. These results also highlight the importance of considering the results of individual verbs in studies that focus on lexical semantics, as they not only help us understand aggregate trends, but also reveal, in this case, that even in cases of deviant underlying semantic representations, licensing restrictions at the syntax-lexical semantic interface remain intact, suggesting that this is an area of resilience in the Heritage Spanish grammar. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Contemporary Advances in Linguistic Research on Heritage Spanish)
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20 pages, 1836 KiB  
Article
Assessing Rhotic Production by Bilingual Spanish Speakers
by Laura D. Cummings Ruiz and Silvina Montrul
Languages 2020, 5(4), 51; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/languages5040051 - 03 Nov 2020
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 3370
Abstract
Due to its articulatory precision, the Spanish rhotic system is generally acquired in late childhood by monolingually-raised (L1) Spanish speakers. Heritage speakers and second language (L2) learners, unlike L1 speakers, risk an incomplete acquisition of the rhotic system due to limited Spanish input [...] Read more.
Due to its articulatory precision, the Spanish rhotic system is generally acquired in late childhood by monolingually-raised (L1) Spanish speakers. Heritage speakers and second language (L2) learners, unlike L1 speakers, risk an incomplete acquisition of the rhotic system due to limited Spanish input and possible phonological interference from English. In order to examine the effects of age of onset of bilingualism and cross-linguistic influence on bilinguals’ rhotic productions, twenty-four adult participants (six sequential bilingual heritage speakers, six simultaneous bilingual heritage speakers, six L1 Spanish speakers, six L2 Spanish learners) were audio recorded in a storytelling task and a picture naming task. The alveolar taps [ɾ] and alveolar trills [r] produced in these tasks were examined according to duration of the rhotic sound and number of apical occlusions. Results showed that the sequential bilinguals, but not the simultaneous bilinguals or the L2 learners, patterned similarly to the L1 Spanish speakers in their production of taps and trills. Neither heritage group produced the English alveolar approximant [ɹ]; the L2 learners, on the other hand, did produce [ɹ] when speaking Spanish. The results of this study suggest that early language input can affect the production of sounds that are acquired in late childhood. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Contemporary Advances in Linguistic Research on Heritage Spanish)
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16 pages, 2629 KiB  
Article
Gender Agreement and Assignment in Spanish Heritage Speakers: Does Frequency Matter?
by Esther Hur, Julio Cesar Lopez Otero and Liliana Sanchez
Languages 2020, 5(4), 48; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/languages5040048 - 30 Oct 2020
Cited by 29 | Viewed by 3696
Abstract
Gender has been extensively studied in Spanish heritage speakers. However, lexical frequency effects have yet to be explored in depth. This study aimed to uncover the extent to which lexical frequency affects the acquisition of gender assignment and gender agreement and to account [...] Read more.
Gender has been extensively studied in Spanish heritage speakers. However, lexical frequency effects have yet to be explored in depth. This study aimed to uncover the extent to which lexical frequency affects the acquisition of gender assignment and gender agreement and to account for possible factors behind heritage language variability. Thirty-nine English-dominant heritage speakers of Spanish completed a lexical knowledge screening task (Multilingual Naming Test (MiNT)) along with an elicited production task (EPT), a forced choice task (FCT), and a self-rating lexical frequency task (SRLFT). Heritage speakers performed more successfully with high-frequency lexical items in both the EPT and the FCT, which examined their acquisition of gender assignment and gender agreement, respectively. Noun canonicity also affected their performance in both tasks. However, heritage speakers presented differences between tasks—we found an overextension of the masculine as well as productive vocabulary knowledge effects in the EPT, whereas the FCT showed an overextension of the feminine and no productive vocabulary knowledge effects. We suggest that lexical frequency, determined by the SRLFT, and productive vocabulary knowledge, as measured by the MiNT, account for the variability in the acquisition of gender assignment but not on gender agreement, supporting previous claims that production is more challenging than comprehension for bilinguals. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Contemporary Advances in Linguistic Research on Heritage Spanish)
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26 pages, 1312 KiB  
Article
Clitic-Doubled Left Dislocation in Heritage Spanish: Judgment versus Production Data
by Jose Sequeros-Valle, Bradley Hoot and Jennifer Cabrelli
Languages 2020, 5(4), 47; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/languages5040047 - 29 Oct 2020
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2285
Abstract
This project examines whether heritage speakers of Spanish distinguish when Spanish clitic-doubled left dislocation (CLLD) is discursively appropriate via an acceptability judgment task (AJT) and a speeded production task (SPT). This two-task experimental design is intended to determine whether heritage speakers diverge from [...] Read more.
This project examines whether heritage speakers of Spanish distinguish when Spanish clitic-doubled left dislocation (CLLD) is discursively appropriate via an acceptability judgment task (AJT) and a speeded production task (SPT). This two-task experimental design is intended to determine whether heritage speakers diverge from an L1 Spanish/L2 English baseline and, if so, whether such divergence is due to their grammatical knowledge, processing constraints, or other task effects. The baseline group accepted and produced CLLD significantly more than other constructions in anaphoric contexts, with the opposite pattern in non-anaphoric contexts, as expected for Spanish. The heritage speakers showed the same significant differences in production in both conditions and in the AJT’s anaphoric condition; in the non-anaphoric condition, however, they did not show any differences between CLLD and the other relevant constructions. We argue that this group of heritage speakers knows the discursive distribution of CLLD just as the baseline speakers do, as attested by the similar performance pattern in production. Furthermore, we posit that their AJT performance, which shows evidence of overextension of CLLD beyond its anaphoric context and into non-anaphoric contexts, may be due to the metalinguistic nature of AJTs. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Contemporary Advances in Linguistic Research on Heritage Spanish)
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20 pages, 2023 KiB  
Article
The Comprehension of Tense–Aspect Morphology by Spanish Heritage Speakers in the United Kingdom
by James Corbet and Laura Domínguez
Languages 2020, 5(4), 46; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/languages5040046 - 29 Oct 2020
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 2942
Abstract
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, [...] Read more.
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. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Contemporary Advances in Linguistic Research on Heritage Spanish)
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22 pages, 1603 KiB  
Article
Early versus Extended Exposure in Speech Perception Learning: Evidence from Switched-Dominance Bilinguals
by Michael Blasingame and Ann R. Bradlow
Languages 2020, 5(4), 39; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/languages5040039 - 18 Oct 2020
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 2332
Abstract
Both the timing (i.e., when) and amount (i.e., how much) of language exposure affect language-learning outcomes. We compared speech recognition accuracy across three listener groups for whom the order (first versus second) and dominance (dominant versus non-dominant) of two languages, English and Spanish, [...] Read more.
Both the timing (i.e., when) and amount (i.e., how much) of language exposure affect language-learning outcomes. We compared speech recognition accuracy across three listener groups for whom the order (first versus second) and dominance (dominant versus non-dominant) of two languages, English and Spanish, varied: one group of Spanish heritage speakers (SHS; L2-English dominant; L1-Spanish non-dominant) and two groups of late onset L2 learners (L1-dominant English/Spanish learners and L1-dominant Spanish/English learners). Sentence-final word recognition accuracy in both English and Spanish was assessed across three “easy” versus “difficult” listening conditions: (1) signal-to-noise ratio (SNR; +5 dB SNR versus 0 dB SNR), (2) sentence predictability (high versus low sentence predictability), and (3) speech style (clear versus plain speech style). Overall, SHS English recognition accuracy was equivalent to that of the L1-dominant English Spanish learners, whereas SHS Spanish recognition accuracy was substantially lower than that of the L1-dominant Spanish English learners. Moreover, while SHS benefitted in both languages from the “easy” listening conditions, they were more adversely affected by (i.e., they recognized fewer words) the presence of higher noise and lower predictability in their non-dominant L1 Spanish compared to their dominant L2 English. These results identify both a benefit and limit on the influence of early exposure. Specifically, the L2-dominant heritage speakers displayed L1-like speech recognition in their dominant-L2, as well as generally better recognition in their non-dominant L1 than late onset L2 learners. Yet, subtle recognition accuracy differences between SHS and L1-dominant listeners emerged under relatively difficult communicative conditions. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Contemporary Advances in Linguistic Research on Heritage Spanish)
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