Abstract
Many previous studies have found that adult heritage speakers exhibit significant variability in their production and comprehension of mood morphology in Spanish. Nonetheless, it remains unclear what specific factors predict heritage speakers’ likelihood of exhibiting such variability. The present study contributes to this question by testing the effect of both (a) age-of-acquisition of English and (b) Spanish proficiency on heritage speakers’ productive and receptive knowledge of mood morphology. Seventeen “early” heritage speakers (age of acquisition of English: 0 to 3.5 years), 20 “late” heritage speakers (age of acquisition of English: 4 to 6 years), and 18 later childhood immigrants (age of arrival in the US: 8 to 12 years) completed a Contextualized Elicited Production Task and a Mood Preference Task. Results of the two experiments suggest that the later childhood immigrants, despite “overusing” subjunctive in +Presupposition adjectival relative clauses, are significantly more likely than “early” and “late” heritage speakers to produce and prefer subjunctive mood in expected subjunctive contexts (with para que and in -Presupposition adjectival relative clauses). Within the heritage speaker groups, however, Spanish proficiency was a stronger predictor of subjunctive knowledge than age of acquisition of English, a finding with implications for both heritage language research and pedagogy.
Highlights
IntroductionThe term heritage speaker (HS) has both a cultural and a linguistic conceptualization, respectively
The term heritage speaker (HS) has both a cultural and a linguistic conceptualization, respectively. Though each of these conceptualizations relies upon contrasts between a majority/societal language, which is spoken by all members of a particular nation-state, and a minority/heritage language, which is spoken by a smaller subset of the population in a more limited range of contexts, the two conceptualizations differ from one another in one critical respect
Before presenting the results of the Contextualized Elicited Production Task (CEPT) and the Mood Preference Task (MPT), it is important to first outline the statistical analyses that will be used in this paper
Summary
The term heritage speaker (HS) has both a cultural and a linguistic conceptualization, respectively. Though each of these conceptualizations relies upon contrasts between a majority/societal language, which is spoken by (almost) all members of a particular nation-state, and a minority/heritage language, which is spoken by a smaller subset of the population (e.g., immigrants and their children) in a more limited range of contexts (e.g., at home, in church), the two conceptualizations differ from one another in one critical respect. Linguistic conceptualization of this term, on the other hand, early childhood experience with the minority/heritage language is a critical and defining trait. To be considered a “linguistic” HS, someone must “grow up exposed to a minority language in Languages 2019, 4, 69; doi:10.3390/languages4030069 www.mdpi.com/journal/languages
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