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.

Spanish and Romanian have Differential Object Marking (DOM) systems conditioned by similar but not the same features. This study examined whether Romanian-speaking highly proficient L2 users of Spanish show signs of crosslinguistic influence from Romanian in their acquisition of the distribution of DOM in Spanish. A group of Spanish-speaking monolinguals and a group of Romanian-Spanish bilinguals who acquired Spanish naturalistically completed an Acceptability Judgment Task that investigated their receptive grammatical knowledge of the DOM in Spanish and, for the bilinguals, Romanian. The results are discussed within the frame of the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis and the Activation Approach.

This study examines the distribution and use of simple and progressive forms in two groups: English-speaking heritage speakers of Spanish in the U.S. (n = 9) and Brazilian Portuguese-speaking heritage speakers of Spanish in Brazil (n = 15). We hypothesized that the groups would show different crosslinguistic influence from their dominant languages in their choice of verb forms. We collected semi-spontaneous production data via oral narratives and analyzed group differences in verb form, either simple or progressive, in activity and accomplishment verbs (Vendler, 1967). The results show a main effect for group, confirming that English-Spanish bilinguals favor progressive verb forms in such contexts, while Brazilian Portuguese-Spanish bilinguals opt for simple verb forms. We discuss our findings following previous work by Jiang (2000) and Putnam & Sánchez (2013).

We investigate whether dominance, language experience, and increased interaction have an effect on the development of heritage bilingual children’s knowledge of the discourse-pragmatic constraints guiding null and overt subjects. A group of child heritage bilinguals (n = 18, mean age = 5;5) and comparison groups of adults: Mexican Spanish monolinguals (n = 15), heritage bilinguals in the United States (n = 16), and English monolinguals in the United States (n = 16) completed a language background questionnaire, a portion of the Bilingual English-Spanish Assessment (BESA) in English and Spanish, a forced-choice task (FCT) in Spanish, and two acceptability judgment tasks (AJT s): one in English and one in Spanish. Results showed that heritage children and adults pattern similarly and differently from adult monolinguals. Increased interaction at home has a positive effect on accuracy in the pragmatic conditions that license null subjects in Spanish without affecting overt subject patterns in English, the dominant language.

In monolingual (L1) acquisition, children produce target-like subject-verb agreement early in development in both Spanish (Grinstead 1998) and English (Guasti 2002). However, in heritage simultaneous bilinguals (2L1) and child second language acquirers (L2), agreement morphology shows variability (Goldin 2020; Herschensohn & Stevenson 2005) due to age of acquisition (AoA) effects. Lexical frequency is another factor that has been shown to play a role in modulating L1 (i.e. Ambridge et al. 2015) and heritage acquisition (i.e. Giancaspro 2017, 2020), but little is known about its effect in child L2. This study explores the extent to which verb lexical frequency plays a role in the acquisition of verb morphology for bilingual children with differing AoA, comparing 42 2L1 heritage children with 46 L2 Spanish learners with AoA of 5;0. They participated in a Spanish fill-in-the-blanks production task. The results of an analysis focused on singular correr and comer (chosen because they differ in only one phoneme) indicated that responses to comer, the more frequent verb, were more target-like for both groups, and that frequency showed a stronger effect for heritage 2L1 children than for L2 children, while also modulating non-target-like responses. We discuss these findings with implications for bilingual development and education.