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.

This study reports on grammatical gender assignment in elicited production data from heritage speakers of Turkish, Papiamento, and Spanish in the Netherlands. We investigate the role of cross-linguistic influence from the heritage language onto the societal language by comparing three heritage languages that differ in terms of the properties of the nominal domain, including gender. Determiner-adjective-noun constructions were elicited by means of a Director-Matcher task (Gullberg, Indefrey, & Muysken, 2009), which was performed both in a unilingual Dutch mode, and in a code-switching mode from Dutch to the heritage language. The results show that all groups tend to overgeneralize the common gender in the Dutch unilingual mode. Strikingly, the performance of heritage speakers of Spanish was more target-like than the Papiamento and Turkish speakers, which may be due to the fact that Spanish is the only language that has a grammatical gender system. In code-switching mode, most speakers tend to assign common gender to inserted nouns, but some speakers also apply a gender assignment strategy based on the translation equivalent of the noun in Dutch, or produce a postnominal adjective construction with an uninflected adjective. An analysis of extra-linguistic variables demonstrated that gender assignment strategies seem to be determined to some extent by the degree of dominance in the societal language.

IntroductionThis study examines adjective-noun order in code-switched constructions by heritage speakers of Spanish and Papiamento in the Netherlands. Given that Dutch differs from Spanish and Papiamento regarding the default position of the adjective, word order in the nominal domain creates a so-called “conflict site” in code-switching. Most accounts of word order patterns in code-switching focus on structural constraints, such as the matrix language or the strength of the EPP feature in Agr. Thus far, studies comparing the two models have not found compelling evidence for either of them.MethodsThe present study takes a more comprehensive approach and considers several linguistic (matrix language, adjective language, and type of insertion) as well as extra-linguistic variables (e.g., age, age of onset, and patterns of exposure and use). Moreover, we compare heritage speakers of two different heritage languages that are linguistically similar (both Spanish and Papiamento exhibit postnominal adjectives), and share the same dominant societal language, but are likely to differ from each other in terms of certain sociolinguistic properties. 21 Spanish and 15 Papiamento heritage speakers (aged 7–54) in the Netherlands carried out a Director-Matcher task, aimed at eliciting nominal constructions containing switches.ResultsThe results show that either the ML or the language of the adjective, or both, are important predictors for word order, although the data cannot disentangle these two factors. Moreover, the type of insertion was found to play a role: word order patterns for noun insertions differed from other types of insertions. In addition, the two groups did not behave similarly: Papiamento speakers were more categorical in their preference for noun-adjective order when inserting Dutch nouns into their heritage language than the Spanish speakers were. Finally, there was a great deal of individual variation, which seemed to be related mostly to the age of the participants: children and teen participants behaved differently from adults.DiscussionThese findings demonstrate that both linguistic and extra-linguistic play a role in determining how heritage speakers deal with conflict sites in the nominal domain. Particularly, the findings suggest that, at least for some communities and in some code-switching modes, children may need more time, or more input, too converge on adult-like code-switching norms.