<i>Me, mi, my</i>: Innovation and variability in heritage speakers’ knowledge of inalienable possession

Abstract

The present study investigates variability in heritage speakers' (HSs) knowledge of inalienable possession in Spanish (e.g., me rompí el brazo: 'I broke my arm'). By testing HSs' productive and receptive knowledge of this property, the study fills an important gap in the literature and, furthermore, explores whether differences in performance across productive and receptive modalities reflect grammatical innovation at the level of underlying representation. Thirty HSs (16 advanced proficiency, 14 intermediate proficiency) and 15 Spanish-dominant controls (SDCs) completed two experimental tasks, each testing both inalienable and alienable object contexts. Results from the Elicited Production Task show that the HSs exhibit significant variability. Unlike the SDCs, who almost categorically produce clitics to communicate the inalienability of objects, the two HS groups rely more heavily on possessive determiners, alternating frequently between the "target" form (Clitic + DefDet: me rompí el brazo) and three different " innovative" variants (e.g., NoClitic + PossDet: rompí mi brazo). Results from the Acceptability Judgment Task complicate this finding by revealing that the HSs, despite their productive variability, make all of the same within-group distinctions as the SDCs, suggesting that they retain systematic receptive knowledge of inalienable possession. To explain these seemingly contradictory patterns, as well as the strong effect of Spanish proficiency on HSs' performance across tasks, we suggest that HSs' variability is consistent with English to Spanish influence at the level of bilingual alignments, transient storage mechanisms proposed by Sánchez (2019) to account for gradient and variable performance in multiple bilingual contexts.

On the Acquisition of Differential Object Marking in Child Heritage Spanish: Bilingual Education, Exposure, and Age Effects (In Memory of Phoebe Search)

“…The data from the present study also largely (but not entirely) support Putnam and Sánchez's (2013) feature-oriented approach to HL acquisition and maintenance. This model correctly predicts a role for patterns of exposure, particularly in production, a finding that is supported (A) through the effect of exposure to Spanish via bilingual education and (B) by the effect of proficiency, a proxy for current exposure (Giancaspro and Sánchez 2021;López Otero and Jimenez 2022). Additional evidence for this framework stems from the finding that HSs recognized and selected DOM more often than they produced it.…”

“…The present study concentrated only on animate and specific direct objects, the "core" case of DOM (Aissen 2003), so discussion is limited to this context only. As stated previously, multiple recent studies have argued that proficiency represents participants' levels of HL exposure at the time of testing (Giancaspro and Sánchez 2021;López Otero and Jimenez 2022). 4 Although Reina et al (2021) document the retraction of DOM in Caribbean varieties of Spanish, there is no evidence that Dominican speakers omit the dative marker a with definite nouns that are animate and specific.…”

The Distribution of Manner and Frequency Adverbs in Child Heritage Speakers of Spanish

“…This approach posits that the speakers' mind creates connections or "alignments" to store and retrieve information related to different language patterns, structures, and components (e.g., phonology, morphology, syntax). The alignments allow for the merging and inclusion of components from the two languages (they are permeable), resulting in morphosyntactic shifts and mismatches between the production and comprehension of the less dominant language as the components from the two languages come together (López-Otero 2019; Giancaspro and Sánchez 2021). The alignments may be fleeting/temporary depending on the specific patterns of language activation and use for comprehension and production purposes, as well as linguistic proficiency.…”

(Ir)regular Mood Swings: Lexical Variability in Heritage Speakers’ Oral Production of Subjunctive Mood

“…One of the most puzzling patterns of heritage bilingualism is intraspeaker variability (Giancaspro & Sánchez, 2021;Perez-Cortes, 2021, 2022, defined here as a single speaker's alternation between multiple forms in a single linguistic context. Though heritage speakers (HSs)-like other speakers, both monolingual and multilingual-display such variability with inherently variable properties, such as subject pronoun expression in Spanish (Otheguy & Zentella, 2012), they also, and perhaps more interestingly, exhibit variability with linguistic forms that are produced invariably (or almost invariably) by dominant speakers of that language (e.g., first-generation immigrants).…”