Morphological transparency and markedness matter in heritage speaker gender processing: an EEG study

Abstract

The present study investigated the qualitative nature of grammatical gender knowledge and processing in heritage speakers (HSs) of Spanish living in the United States. Forty-four adult Spanish HS bilinguals participated, completing a behavioral grammatical gender assignment task and a grammaticality judgment task (GJT) while their brain activity was recorded using electroencephalography (EEG). The EEG GJT task included grammatical and ungrammatical sentences with grammatical gender violations on inanimate nouns, where transparency of the morpho(phono)logical cue and markedness were manipulated. The results of this study revealed that grammatical gender violations elicited the typical P600 effect across all relevant conditions, indicating that the grammatical representations and processing of grammatical gender in HSs are qualitatively similar to those in Spanish-dominant native speakers. Given the experimental manipulation in this study, these findings also suggest that both morphological transparency and markedness play significant roles in how grammatical gender is processed. However, the results of this study differ from those reported in previous studies with Spanish-dominant native speakers, as the P600 effect found was accompanied by a biphasic N400 effect. This pattern of results is interpreted as further evidence that the bilingual experience of HSs modulates certain aspects of morphosyntactic processing, particularly conferring a greater reliance on morphology. Additionally, the results of this study highlight the importance of incorporating neurolinguistic online processing methods to better understand what underlies HS bilingual competence and processing outcomes.

Being a heritage speaker matters: the role of markedness in subject-verb person agreement in Italian

“…These findings might be surprising at first consideration since they seem to suggest that verbal agreement is affected negatively by more HL use/exposure. However, it could be the case that these results relate to reading effects in general or to our claims that HSs are particularly sensitive to morphological defaults ( Di Pisa et al, 2022 ; Luque et al, 2023 ). That is, the more they use the language, the more they are aware of these morphological exponents.…”

“…Results were interpreted as a heightened sensitivity to functional morphology in the case of HS processing, resulting in a speed-accuracy tradeoff. Thus, these Italian HSs have qualitatively similar gender representations and processing abilities to homeland speakers but their context of acquisition and their unique pattern of HL use make them more sensitive to morphological patterns during real-time gender processing (see also Luque et al, 2023). These same effects were found in an elicited production task (Di , where the same HS participants were asked to orally produce correct concord between the noun and the adjective, whereas they were not replicated in the homeland Italian and non-native late learner comparison groups reported on in Di Pisa (2023), indicating a greater reliance/awareness of HSs to overt morphological exponents, at least in the nominal domain.…”

Cognitive Neuroscience Perspectives on Language Acquisition and Processing

“…Accordingly, participants were trained on a selected Latin lexicon over two sessions (allowing for a consolidation period) and, afterward (i.e., in session 2), on two grammatical properties: case (similar between German and Latin) and adjective-noun order (similar between Italian and Latin). Neurophysiological findings show an N200/N400 deflection for the heritage speakers in case morphology and a P600 effect for the German L2 group in adjectival position, the former indicating differential attention allocation being recruited as a function of this group's being early bilinguals, which the authors suggest makes them more sensitive to morphological contrasts in general (see also [26,27]). The latter, the P600 effect, conversely indicates that learning the target property within the experimental paradigm must be explanatory, given that Germany could not have provided transfer for this property.…”