Grammatical gender selection and phrasal word order in child heritage Spanish: A feature re-assembly approach

Abstract

The present study examines the development of grammatical gender assignment, agreement, and noun-adjective word order in child heritage Spanish among thirty-two Spanish–English bilingual children born and raised in the United States. A picture-naming task revealed significant overextension of the masculine form and high levels of ungrammatical word order strings. There were no significant differences by age regarding gender concord or noun-adjective word order. We argue that the differences found can be accounted for in terms of a re-assembly of gender features leading to both morphological and syntactic variability. This approach allows for subsequent morphosyntactic shifts during early childhood depending on patterns of language use, and conceptualizes heritage language variation along the lines of current linguistic theorizing regarding the role of innate linguistic principles and language experience in language development.

In support of representational economy: Agreement in heritage Spanish

“…This pair of findings-contrasts between feminine-and masculine-head-noun attraction conditions and grammaticality effects for masculine head nouns-indicates that heritage speakers are aware of and sensitive to gender. Indeed, Cuza & Pérez-Tattam (2016) find early knowledge of gender distinctions in child heritage learners of Spanish. If we take this evidence seriously, then we can maintain the conclusion that heritage speakers have reanalyzed the feature system of Spanish so that it levels the hierarchical distinction between number and gender.…”

A Comparison of the Grammatical Production of Child Heritage Speakers of Spanish across Language and Grade: Kindergarten and Grade 1

“…Cuza and Pérez-Tattam's study lends support to the Feature Re-Assembly Approach for L2 acquisition [22], adapted to child heritage speakers of Spanish [21,22]. As children were restructuring the unique morphological features of Spanish (gender agreement) into the emerging weaker agreement features of L2 English, they overextended the use of the masculine gender.…”

“…Cuza and Pérez-Tattam analyzed gender selection and phrasal word order in the production data of 32 Spanish-English children aged 5-10 and born in the United States [21]. Their answers on a picture naming task were compared with the answers of Spanish monolingual peers of the same age.…”

“…The progressive in Spanish connects in distribution to the present tense, and the latter is sometimes chosen by Spanish native speakers over the ongoing aspect of the progressive to describe an action in progress. HSs may also display this preference, behaving like traditional native speakers in their overextension of the present tense in an ongoing context [21,41].…”

Mass-count distinction in Chinese-English bilingual students

“…Yet, even advanced learners of L2 French were found to use only one form for both genders (Hawkins 2001). This pattern of simplification was found in both learners with genderless L1 (Hawkins 2001;Cuza & Pérez-Tattam 2016) and in those whose L1 has grammatical gender (Bruhn de Garavito & White 2002), suggesting that the tendency towards transparent form-meaning mapping is likely a universal principle.…”