Pathways of Development in Child Heritage Speakers' Use of Spanish Demonstratives

Abstract

Scholars have argued that restricted language input slows language acquisition, but the pathway of development may remain the same. The current study investigated the influence of amount of Spanish input on Spanish demonstrative usage among 19 U.S. child heritage speakers, ages 3;4–8;7. Demonstratives are among the first grammatical features to emerge in children’s language, but we know little about their acquisition by heritage speakers. Previous research shows that monolingual Spanish-speaking children rely heavily on este/esta ‘this’ andonly later learn to vary between demonstrative forms, using este/esta primarily for proximal referents and ese/esa ‘that’ for distal referents. As such, we hypothesized that child heritage speakers who experience restricted Spanish input would rely on este/esta for a prolonged period of time. 586 demonstratives were elicited during a puzzle completion task and were coded for referent location (proximal, distal). Contrary to our hypothesis, less Spanish spoken at home negatively correlated with proportion of este/esta-usage. Children exposed to abundant Spanish in the home patterned like adult monolingual Spanish speakers, producing este/esta for proximal referents and ese/esa for distal referents. By contrast, children who experienced restricted input in Spanish produced mostly ese/esa, regardless of spatial location of the referent. The results suggest that restricted input in Spanish yields a developmental trajectory with overgeneralization of ese/esa rather than este/esta. Importantly, we argue thatthe identification of two groups of child heritage speakers who exhibit different developmental pathways lends itself to differentiated instruction in the heritage language classroom.

Child Heritage Speakers’ Overregularization of Spanish Past Participles

“…However, her study only included two bilingual children compared to 45 monolingual children. Thus, the current study aims to further investigate language background by focusing on child heritage speakers, who offer an excellent test case for investigating the impact of language experience on the developing heritage grammar (Flores et al 2017;Mueller Gathercole and Thomas 2009;Rodina and Westergaard 2017;Shin et al 2021;Silva-Corvalán 2014;Thordardottir 2015). The current study includes 20 children born and raised in the USA.…”

Structured variation in child heritage speakers' grammars

“…Interspeaker variation, which refers to differences among speakers, is a prominent topic in bilingual child language research in light of the enormous heterogeneity in bilingual children's language experience, which in turn shapes their linguistic development (Daskalaki et al, 2020;Flores et al, 2017;Gathercole & Hoff, 2007;Hoff & Core, 2013;Jia & Paradis, 2015;Thordardottir, 2011Thordardottir, , 2015Thordardottir, , 2019. Bilingual children, including child heritage speakers, are especially heterogeneous in terms of the input they experience (Shin et al, 2021) due to factors such as generational status (e.g., immigrant group), sibling status, access to education in both languages, etc. (Giancaspro, 2019).…”