Loss of Gender Agreement in L1 Attrition: Preliminary Results

Command of gender agreement in school-age Spanish-English Bilingual Children

“…Except for Anderson's (1999) study of two preschool-age siblings, we do not have data on how school-age bilingual children produce agreement with real words they know. One aim of this study is to compare how the gender agreement rule is affected in bilingual children of different proficiency levels in Spanish as a function of language learned first and order of acquisition (as well as input and use).…”

Defining an “ideal” heritage speaker: Theoretical and methodological challenges Reply to peer commentaries

“…those with two such parents. The children studied by Silva-Corvalán had only one Spanish-speaking parent, while the children studied by Anderson (1999Anderson ( , 2001) had two Spanish-speaking parents, yet all cases showed attrition and incomplete acquisition.…”

“…As accuracy on English comprehension and production increased in Merino's subjects over time, their use of Spanish decreased, and their production and comprehension accuracy on complex structures (subjunctives, relative clauses, conditionals) attrited accordingly. Anderson (1999Anderson ( , 2001) presents a longitudinal study of two siblings from Puerto Rico who immigrated with their parents (both professors) to the United States when they were 2 and 4 years old, respectively. The siblings were followed longitudinally beginning two years after their immigration, at ages 4 and 6, respectively, and the recordings ended when the sisters were 6 and 8 years old.…”

Review article: Second language acquisition welcomes the heritage language learner: opportunities of a new field

“…It is an open question, therefore, as to whether the transfer effects in these two situations are comparable: is L1 influence in adult L2 learners (late bilinguals) similar to L2 influence in early bilinguals? In short, although there is some basic research that systematically compares L2 learners and heritage speakers -as well as research focusing on the systematic nature of incompletely acquired L1 grammatical systems in children and adults (Silva-Corvalán, 1994;Håkansson, 1995;Song et al, 1997;Anderson, 1999;Montrul, 2002;2004;Kondo-Brown, 2005;Polinsky, 2006;2008;Bolonyai, 2007) -this trend should continue. The findings from these research programs have much bearing on our understanding of the role of age on language acquisition and loss more generally, and they are crucial to inform linguistic theory and the heritage language teaching profession.…”