Abstract
Whilst heritage Spanish has been widely examined in the USA, less is known about the acquisition of Spanish in other English-dominant contexts such as the UK, and studies rarely assess the baseline grammar that heritage speakers are exposed to directly. In this study, we implemented a semantic interpretation task to 17 bilinguals in the UK to investigate child heritage speakers’ and their parents’ comprehension of the preterite–imperfect aspectual contrast in Spanish, an area of known difficulty. The results show that the parents are consistently more accurate in accepting and rejecting the appropriate morphemes than the children. Further analysis shows that children’s accuracy was best predicted by age at time of testing, suggesting that young heritage speakers of Spanish in the UK can acquire the target grammar. However, this general increase in accuracy with age was not found for the continuous reading of imperfective aspect. This finding implicates a more nuanced role of cross-linguistic influence in early heritage speakers’ grammar(s), and partially explains greater difficulty with the imperfect observed in production studies with other heritage speakers.
Highlights
In this paper, we investigate Spanish heritage speakers’ accuracy in the comprehension of past aspectual verb forms, the preterite–imperfect contrast, in a context that has not received much attention in the literature far: the United Kingdom (UK) (Guardado 2018)
(e.g., Pascual y Cabo and de la Rosa Prada 2016) in contact with English over multiple generations may contribute to outcomes observed for Spanish heritage speakers in that context in a way that would not be predicted in the UK (Cazzoli-Goeta and Young-Scholten 2011)
The results demonstrate relative stability in the baseline grammars, with the parents reliably distinguishing between the preterite and imperfect in all contexts
Summary
We investigate Spanish heritage speakers’ accuracy in the comprehension of past aspectual verb forms, the preterite–imperfect contrast, in a context that has not received much attention in the literature far: the United Kingdom (UK) (Guardado 2018). (e.g., Pascual y Cabo and de la Rosa Prada 2016) in contact with English over multiple generations may contribute to outcomes observed for Spanish heritage speakers in that context in a way that would not be predicted in the UK (Cazzoli-Goeta and Young-Scholten 2011). Spanish has been claimed to “axiomatically co-exist” with English in the USA (Pascual y Cabo and de la Rosa Prada 2016), reflecting its high visibility as the second most widely spoken language in that country (Lipski 2008), with approximately 17% of the population being of “Hispanic” background (Pascual y Cabo 2018). Silva-Corvalán (1994) noted that whilst Spanish is maintained at the community level in Los Angeles by the constant arrival of new immigrants, the majority of families undergo language shift from Spanish to English, with individuals in the third generation typically functionally
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