Auditory Processing of Gender Agreement across Relative Clauses by Spanish Heritage Speakers

Daniel Vergara,Gilda Socarrás

doi:10.3390/languages6010008

Abstract

Processing research on Spanish gender agreement has focused on L2 learners’ and—to a lesser extent—heritage speakers’ sensitivity to gender agreement violations. This research has been mostly carried out in the written modality, which places heritage speakers at a disadvantage as they are more frequently exposed to Spanish auditorily. This study contributes to the understanding of the differences between heritage and L2 grammars by examining the processing of gender agreement in the auditory modality and its impact on comprehension. Twenty Spanish heritage speakers and 20 intermediate L2 learners listened to stimuli containing two nouns with gender mismatches in the main clause, and an adjective in the relative clause that only agreed in gender with one of the nouns. We measured noun-adjective agreement accuracy through participants’ responses to an auditory task. Our results show that heritage speakers are more accurate than L2 learners in the auditory processing of gender agreement information for comprehension. Additionally, heritage speakers’ accuracy is modulated by their Spanish language proficiency and age of onset. Participants also exhibit higher accuracies in cases in which the adjective agrees with the first noun. We argue that this is an ambiguity resolution strategy influenced by the experimental task.

Highlights

Heritage speakers (HS) present a challenge for auditory processing research, due to the heterogeneity of this linguistic group
Languages 2021, 6, 8 study shows that HS are more accurate in the auditory processing of gender agreement information for general sentence comprehension than L2 learners, which allows us to better understand the differences between heritage and L2 grammars in terms of comprehension of the auditory input
This highlights the positive impact that an earlier exposure to auditory input in the heritage language has for processing

Summary

Introduction

Heritage speakers (HS) present a challenge for auditory processing research, due to the heterogeneity of this linguistic group. HS in the United States are broadly defined as individuals who grew up in a home where a non-English language was spoken, in this case Spanish, but exhibit different degrees of dominance in the majority language: English (Montrul et al 2013) This experience with Spanish in early childhood aligns their acquisition context—to a certain extent—to that of monolingual speakers growing up in countries where Spanish is the majority language. Given that HS are not a homogenous linguistic group, they can display different levels of linguistic competence in production and comprehension abilities in the heritage language In this sense, some of these speakers may align with adult L2 learners in their effectiveness processing Spanish (see Montrul et al 2008). This highlights the importance of establishing comparisons between these two groups to better understand HS grammars and how these differ from the grammars of L2 learners, a question that carries important theoretical and practical significance

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