On the role of experience and age-related effects: Evidence from the Spanish CP

Abstract

The present study examines and compares the extent to which advanced L2 learners of Spanish and Spanish heritage speakers acquire the syntactic and semantic properties that regulate the grammatical representation of double complementizer questions in Spanish, a CP-related structure not present in English. Results from an aural sentence completion task, an acceptability judgment task, and a preference task indicate significant differences between the two experimental groups and the monolingual controls. However, the heritage speakers outperformed the L2 learners in their target use and interpretation, which suggests a linguistic benefit for earlier exposure and use of Spanish during childhood. We propose that the differences observed among the L2 learners and the heritage speakers can be accounted for in terms of cross-linguistic influence from the dominant language as well as language experience and age of onset of bilingualism as an interrelated dimension in L2 and heritage language development.