An Exploratory Study of the Effect of Spanish Immersion Education on the Acquisition of Pronominal Subjects in Child Heritage Speakers

Abstract

Studies have found that aspects of grammar that lie at the syntax–pragmatics interface, such as the use of pronominal subjects in null-subject languages, are likely to undergo cross-linguistic influence in bilingual speakers. This study contributes to our understanding of the role of Spanish immersion academic instruction on the comprehension of null subjects in English-dominant, Spanish-heritage children living in the United States. Two groups of bilingual children aged 4 to 7 (those attending a Spanish immersion school and those not) completed an acceptability judgment task in both English and Spanish. English monolingual children and monolingually raised Spanish children of the same ages also completed the task in their respective languages. The findings revealed that children in the Spanish immersion school performed on par with their monolingual peers in Spanish, but accepted significantly more ungrammatical null subjects in English than the other groups. These results suggest that immersion schooling plays a role in extending the English null subject stage in bilingual children due to competing input and cross-linguistic influence.

Dominance, Language Experience, and Increased Interaction Effects on the Development of Pragmatic Knowledge in Heritage Bilingual Children

“…We hypothesize that we will see evidence of cross-linguistic influence both from Spanish to English and from English to Spanish in the distribution of null and overt subjects, as has been shown to occur in previous studies (Austin et al, 2017;Goldin, 2020aGoldin, , 2020b. We also hypothesize that this influence correlates with language dominance, such that Spanish-dominant children will accept null subjects in continuous contexts in English.…”

“…These findings suggest a complex picture of the development of morphosyntactic and pragmatic abilities. This analysis is surprising given the findings from Shin and Cairns (2012) and Goldin (2020aGoldin ( , 2020b, who found that morphosyntactic abilities develop concurrently with early pragmatic abilities in bilingual and monolingual children until age 5-6, followed by many years of fine-tuning of pragmatic knowledge. The results of our study suggest that it is possible for children to develop morphosyntactic competence and gradually develop pragmatic abilities that mirror those of heritage bilingual adults in their environment.…”

“…During this period, children produce main clause declaratives with both inflected verb forms that are grammatical in the adult language and infinitival verb forms that are not (Wexler, 1994). Experimental evidence from English-speaking children has shown that the null subject stage and the root infinitive stage both taper off together at around the same age (Orfitelli & Hyams, 2008;Goldin, 2020b).…”

“…Null/Overt Subject Acceptance by Heritage Bilingual Children There is robust evidence of cross-linguistic influence in bilingual children acquiring one overt-subject language, like English, and one null-subject language, such as Spanish (Paradis & Navarro, 2003;Silva-Corvalán, 2014;Montrul & Sánchez-Walker, 2015;Austin et al, 2017;Goldin, 2020b), Italian (Serratrice, 2006(Serratrice, , 2007, Greek (Argyri & Sorace, 2007), Hebrew (Hacohen & Schaeffer, 2007) and Turkish (Haznedar, 2010). Almost always, this cross-linguistic influence manifests itself as an overuse of overt pronouns in the null subject language and the infelicitous application of the discourse-pragmatic principles guiding overt subject use from the overt subject language (i.e., Silva-Corvalán, 2014;Montrul & Sánchez-Walker, 2015).…”

Object clitic use and intuition in the Spanish of heritage speakers from Brazil

“…This model has been tested extensively in studies examining the acquisition of various morphosyntactic features (Hur et al, 2020; Putnam and Schwarz, 2014; Yager et al, 2015, Yager, 2016, amongst others). For instance, previous studies testing this model have used patterns of heritage language use as a proxy for heritage language activation when examining the acquisition of mood selection (Perez-Cortes, 2016), gender selection, and phrasal word order (Cuza and Pérez-Tattam, 2015; Hur et al, 2020), and subject pronoun expression (Goldin, 2020).…”