Implicit and Explicit Knowledge of a Multiple Interface Phenomenon: Differential Task Effects in Heritage Speakers and L2 Speakers of Spanish in The Netherlands

Abstract

This paper compares heritage speakers and second language (L2) speakers of Spanish with Dutch as their dominant language, in order to explore the role of age of onset and manner of acquisition in the nature of the knowledge (implicit vs. explicit) of the subjunctive. Differently from previous studies, all items were presented orally and in written form, so that language mode of presentation could be excluded as a confounding factor. Moreover, the groups were matched on their general proficiency in Spanish using both an explicit and an implicit proficiency task. The results showed that the L2 speakers outperformed the heritage speakers in the explicit knowledge task and vice versa in the implicit knowledge task, suggesting that differential task effects, which thus far have only been attested for morpho-syntactic phenomena, can be extended to interface phenomena as well. These findings imply that age of onset and manner of acquisition have an influence in the way knowledge is represented in these two populations, and moreover emphasize the importance of using different task types in bilingual research.

The Study of Heritage Language Development From a Bilingualism and Social Justice Perspective

“…All modern Spanish-speaking nationstates, in fact, have a wealth of autochthonous languages. Thus, for example, when van Osch, Hulk, Aalberse, and Sleeman (2018) recruited HL speakers in the Netherlands with family backgrounds from Mexico, Colombia, Uruguay, Argentina, and Spain, some participants at least may have been multilingual, with a repertoire comprising an indigenous or official language (e.g., Nahuatl, Quichua, Guaraní, Aymara, or Catalan) in addition to the majority language (Dutch) and the HL (Spanish). In another common scenario, for many families multilingualism has always been a regular fact of life prior to migration.…”

“…At the present time, when HLD findings have reached considerable accumulation (Montrul, 2016;Polinsky, 2018b), an important disciplinary conversation has begun to take place. For example, there has been a move toward giving the bilingualism of heritage language speakers a central place in research programs (Aalberse & Hulk, 2018;Benmamoun, Montrul, & Polinsky, 2013;Polinsky, 2018a). Some prominent voices have gone far in arguing also that HL speakers are legitimate native speakers of their minority language (Kupisch & Rothman, 2018;Pascual y Cabo & Rothman, 2012), some even proposing that this is the case regardless of nativelike attainment in the HL (Rothman & Treffers-Daller, 2014).…”

Case marking is different in monolingual and heritage Bosnian in digitally elicited oral texts

“…Both are complex, 1 Here we do not refer to adult L2 learners: we assume that heritage grammars are different from L2 grammars in crucial ways, i.e., AoO is early rather than late and mode of instruction is naturalistic, not formal. See studies that report qualitative differences in the underlying linguistic knowledge of these populations for more information, e.g., Van Osch et al, 2018. multidimensional concepts which need to be carefully dissected. There are a multitude of possible sources of linguistic/HL input such as from family and peers, educational institutions (school, preschool, day care) as well as media (books, TV, music) (Unsworth, 2016).…”

How Many Collocations do Heritage Speakers Know?

“…Finally, the robust association between participants' productive knowledge of collocations and language dominance (BLP) suggests that the form recall test could be useful as a diagnostic tool in HLL research. Researchers have debated the validity of the DELE as an assessment for HLLs (Carreira & Potowski, 2011;Van Osch et al, 2018), but there are currently few alternatives. The form recall test developed for this study had a wide range of scores (33-90) and a high degree of internal consistency (α = .91) This measure would likely correlate with other aspects of linguistic proficiency, including vocabulary size (see Dąbrowska, 2019).…”