Spanish Heritage Speakers Research Articles

Is Grammar Instruction Beneficial for Heritage Language Learners? Dative Case Marking in Spanish

Spanish heritage speakers have been shown to have incomplete knowledge of dative case marking with both animate direct objects (also known as differential object marking (DOM) or a-personal) and dative experiencers with gustar-psych verbs in oral and written modes (Montrul, 2004; Montrul & Bowles, in press). In general, Spanish objects that are animate and specific are obligatorily marked with the preposition a (Juan conoce a tu hermana “Juan knows your sister”). Inanimate objects are unmarked (Juan compró un perro “Juan bought a dog”, Juan escuchó la radio “Juan listened to the radio”). Gustar-type psych verbs take dative experiencers obligatorily marked with the dative preposition a and a dative clitic (A Juan le gusta el rugby “Juan likes rugby”). This study investigated the effects of instruction on the acquisition of DOM and gustarverbs for heritage language learners. A total of 45 2nd generation Spanish heritage speakers participated in the study, completing a pre-test, instructional treatment, and a post-test. The instructional treatment consisted of an explicit grammatical explanation of the uses of a followed by three practice exercises, for which participants received immediate, explicit feedback, including negative evidence. Results of the heritage learners' pre-test confirmed that their recognition and production of a with animate direct objects and dative experiencers is probabilistic, compared with a baseline group of 12 native speakers of Spanish. Post-test results revealed highly significant gains by heritage learners in both intuitions and production, suggesting that instruction, including both positive and negative evidence, facilitates classroom heritage language acquisition, at least in the short term.

Transfer effects in the interpretation of definite articles by Spanish heritage speakers

This study investigates the role of transfer from the stronger language by focusing on the interpretation of definite articles in Spanish and English by Spanish heritage speakers (i.e., minority language-speaking bilinguals) residing in the U.S., where English is the majority language. Spanish plural NPs with definite articles can express generic reference (Los elefantes tienen colmillos de marfil), or specific reference (Los elefantes de este zoológico son marrones). English plurals with definite articles can only have specific reference (The elephants in this zoo are brown), while generic reference is expressed with bare plural NPs (Elephants have ivory tusks). Furthermore, the Spanish definite article is preferred in inalienable possession constructions (Pedro levantó la mano“Peter raised the hand”), whereas in English the use of a definite article typically means that the body part belongs to somebody else (alienable possession). Twenty-three adult Spanish heritage speakers completed three tasks in Spanish (acceptability judgment, truth-value judgment, and picture–sentence matching tasks) and the same three tasks in English. Results show that the Spanish heritage speakers exhibited transfer from English into Spanish with the interpretation of definite articles in generic but not in inalienable possession contexts. Implications of this finding for the field of heritage language research and for theories of article semantics are discussed.

Dominant language transfer in adult second language learners and heritage speakers

The effects of language transfer have been amply documented in second language (L2) acquisition and, to a lesser extent, in the language contact/loss literature (Cook, 2003). In both cases, the stronger and often dominant language encroaches into the structure of the less dominant language in systematic ways. But are transfer effects in these two situations comparable: is first language (L1) influence in adult L2 learners similar to L2 influence in the L1 of early bilinguals? The current study addresses this question by investigating knowledge of Spanish clitics, clitic left dislocations, and differential object marking (DOM) in 72 L2 learners and 67 Spanish heritage speakers. The contact language, English, is assumed to not instantiate these syntactic properties. Results of an oral production task and a written acceptability judgment task indicated overall advantages for the heritage speakers in some areas, but similar effects of transfer from English in the two groups. Transfer effects were less pronounced with core aspects of grammar (syntax proper in the case of clitics) than with aspects of grammar that lie at the interfaces of syntax and semantics/pragmatics, as in the case of clitic left dislocations and DOM. These findings have implications for current views on the vulnerability of certain linguistic interfaces in language development (Sorace, 2004; Serratrice et al., 2004; Tsimpli and Sorace, 2006; White, 2009) and for theories that stress the role of age in L2 acquisition and permanent transfer effects.

How similar are adult second language learners and Spanish heritage speakers? Spanish clitics and word order

ABSTRACTRecent studies of heritage speakers, many of whom possess incomplete knowledge of their family language, suggest that these speakers may be linguistically superior to second language (L2) learners only in phonology but not in morphosyntax. This study reexamines this claim by focusing on knowledge of clitic pronouns and word order in 24 L2 learners and 24 Spanish heritage speakers. Results of an oral production task, a written grammaticality judgment task, and a speeded comprehension task showed that, overall, heritage speakers seem to possess more nativelike knowledge of Spanish than their L2 counterparts. Implications for theories that stress the role of age and experience in L2 ultimate attainment and for the field of heritage language acquisition and teaching are discussed.

Back to basics: Incomplete knowledge of Differential Object Marking in Spanish heritage speakers*

The obligatory use of the preposition a with animate, specific direct objects in Spanish (Juan conoce a María “Juan knows Maria”) is a well-known instance of Differential Object Marking (DOM; Torrego, 1998; Leonetti, 2004). Recent studies have documented the loss and/or incomplete acquisition of several grammatical features in Spanish heritage speakers (Silva-Corvalán, 1994; Montrul, 2002), including DOM (Montrul, 2004a). This study assesses the extent of incomplete knowledge of DOM in Spanish heritage speakers raised in the United States by comparing it with knowledge of DOM in fully competent native speakers. Experiment 1 examined whether omission of a affected grammatical competence, as measured by the linguistic behavior of 67 heritage speakers and 22 monolingual speakers in an oral production task and in a written acceptability judgment task. Experiment 2 followed up on the results of the acceptability judgment task with 13 monolingual speakers and 69 heritage speakers, and examined whether problems with DOM generalize to other instances of structural and inherent dative case, including ditransitive verbs and gustar-type psychological verbs. Results of the two experiments confirmed that heritage speakers' recognition and production of DOM is probabilistic, even for speakers with advanced proficiency in Spanish. This suggests that many heritage speakers' grammars may not actually instantiate inherent case. We argue that language loss under reduced input conditions in childhood is, in this case, like “going back to basics”: it leads to simplification of the grammar by letting go of the non-core options, while retaining the core functional structure.

Spanish–English bilingual psychotherapists: Personal and professional language development and use.

The rapid rise of the Spanish-speaking population in the United States has resulted in an increased demand for Spanish language mental health services. Yet little is known about the training needs of practitioners who provide those services. This qualitative study used in-depth telephone interviews to examine the experiences of 13 Spanish-English bilingual therapists, both native Spanish speakers and heritage speakers of Spanish, in their personal and professional language development and use. The phenomenological analysis highlighted the complexities of living in 2 worlds and providing psychological services in 2 languages. Participants reported that they often felt isolated and disconnected as they struggled to learn and use the 2 languages in their personal and professional lives. While the participants took pride in having the skills of speaking 2 languages and serving a community that is in need, all were aware of their limitations when working bilingually, as they had not received training to do so. Translating their own thoughts during the session, using technical vocabulary, and understanding the variations of Spanish were particularly challenging for the participants who were heritage speakers.

Knowledge of tense-aspect and mood in Spanish heritage speakers

Child and adult Spanish heritage speakers have been shown to display erosion and loss of the tense-aspect and mood system in oral production. In particular, while they retain the preterit—imperfect difference in the past, the meanings and forms are often confused. Subjunctive morphology, on the other hand, is even more affected (Silva-Corvalán, 1994, 2003). Two related studies were conducted to examine the extent of incomplete knowledge of tense-aspect and mood morphology in 65 adult Spanish heritage speakers raised in the USA and a comparison group of 23 fully competent adult native speakers. Study 1 tested the preterit—imperfect contrast with different predicates; Study 2 focused on the present indicative—subjunctive contrast in different subordinate clauses. Both studies used elicited oral and written production tasks to test morphological accuracy and a sentence conjunction judgment task to tap semantic interpretations. The overall results showed significant differences between the native speakers and the heritage speakers, confirming that heritage speakers make errors with grammatical aspect and mood morphology. Accuracy on grammatical aspect, however, is higher than accuracy on subjunctive morphology in oral and written production and interpretation. This result is compatible with the Regression Hypothesis (Jakobson, 1941), which relates order of acquisition to order of language loss, and with the Interfaces Hypothesis (Tsimpli & Sorace, 2006), which takes into account the complexity of certain linguistic interfaces.

Spanish heritage speakers in the Southwest

Several studies have looked into the different uses of indicative and subjunctive in the Spanish of heritage speakers. Generally speaking, research seems to show that mood simplification is taking place in heritage speakers’ Spanish. Mood and modal alternation is of particular interest to research on language change and contact due to the wide variation in the ability of heritage speakers to produce and apply it. (This is, in part, no doubt, due to their embodiment of a complex relationship between syntactic form, semantics and pragmatic meaning.) The present study examines the use of the indicative/subjunctive in the written and oral Spanish production of one group of heritage language speakers to find out which similarities/differences can be found when compared to monolingual speakers and what this says about how their linguistic systems are configurated.

The adult heritage Spanish speaker in the foreign language classroom: a phenomenography

For heritage speakers, the Spanish classroom is not the first point of contact with their native language. Though such learners would benefit from an educational philosophy that affirms the heritage language as a springboard for learning and increased self‐awareness, there has been little support for non‐dominant language research in the USA. This inattention breeds negative consequences not only for heritage speakers themselves, but also for national economic concerns as well. This study takes a phenomenographic approach to reveal the experiences of adult heritage Spanish speakers in programs designed for monolingual English speakers. The data gleaned from this research sheds light on the educational, social, and individual challenges faced by the adult heritage speaker in their quest to improve literacy skills in their native language.

Oye, ¿qué onda con mi dinero?

The objective of this study is to broaden the focus of pragmatic research to include the speech act of complaints produced by heritage speakers of Spanish. In addition to being a face-threatening act, the diverse ways in which complaints are expressed makes them a rich source for investigating how language use can vary across speech communities. Although there has been some research concerning contexts of intercultural communication, the pragmatic proficiency of heritage speakers of Spanish in the United States is an area that merits further investigation. In order to examine heritage speaker complaints, this study compares data from the following three groups: Mexican native speakers of Spanish (22), native speakers of English (40), and heritage speakers of Spanish (21). The heritage speakers and English native speakers in this study were undergraduate students at a large public university in California, while the native speakers of Spanish were university students in Mexico. All the participants completed an on-line Discourse Completion Test that included three complaint scenarios.

Gender Agreement in Adult Second Language Learners and Spanish Heritage Speakers: The Effects of Age and Context of Acquisition

This study investigates knowledge of gender agreement in Spanish L2 learners and heritage speakers, who differ in age and context/mode of acquisition. On some current theoretical accounts, persistent difficulty with grammatical gender in adult L2 acquisition is due to age. These accounts predict that heritage speakers should be more accurate on gender agreement than L2 learners, because their Spanish language acquisition started in infancy. Sixty‐nine heritage speakers, 72 second language (L2) learners, and 22 native Spanish speakers were tested on their oral production, written comprehension, and written recognition of Spanish gender agreement. Results showed advantages for L2 learners in written tasks but advantages for heritage speakers in the oral task. We discuss the significance of these findings for SLA and heritage language acquisition.

A sociolinguistic approach to the use of entonces (so) in the oral narratives of young bilinguals in the United States

The main objective of this study was to assess the impact of English in the Spanish spoken by young Spanish heritage speakers with regard to the use of the Spanish connector entonces(so). The sociolinguistic variables of Spanish language competence and generational adscription were taken into account. The data stem from 56 semi-formal interviews with Spanish heritage language students at the University of Florida. All occurrences of Spanish entonces and English so were codified according to their functions to later correlate those functions with the sociolinguistic variables mentioned above. The results revealed that entonces is used to mark primarily narrative progression, consequence and conclusion while so is used to express consequence and conclusion, as reported in previous studies (Torres, 2002; Aaron, 2004). While both so and entonces share those functions, so never is used to mark temporality. With respect to the social variables, the most significant one is participants’ Spanish level of proficiency. The general results indicate that Spanish dominant speakers tend to use more entonces and fewer so, in contrast to those least proficient in Spanish. Also, for the English dominant speakers so triggers a code-switch from Spanish into English, and for the Spanish-dominant speakers the insertion of so is considered an integrated borrowing.

Characteristics of the Spanish grammar and sociolinguistic proficiency of dual immersion graduates

Dual immersion schools in the United States, which combine native Spanish speakers and students learning Spanish as an L2, encourage English development while promoting Spanish learning. However, relatively little is known about the levels of Spanish attained by dual immersion graduates. This case study describes the performance on a number of measures of a graduating class at a Spanish-English dual immersion school. It analyzes their proficiency in speaking, reading and writing, their production of three grammatical forms, and their ability to identify and produce appropriately polite Spanish. Heritage Spanish speakers evidenced fairly strong Spanish systems. L2 Spanish learners scored low on several measures, but overall could communicate their ideas. Several recommendations are offered for immersion classroom pedagogy.

A comparative study of requests in heritage speaker Spanish, L1 Spanish, and L1 English

Although requests are the most widely studied speech act, there has not been extensive research on the requests produced by heritage speakers of Spanish in the United States. This study compares the requests of three groups: Spanish heritage speakers, Mexican native speakers of Spanish, and native speakers of English. The first research question examines the level of directness of the requests combined with the frequency of downgraders. The following two research questions analyzed separately the level of directness of the head act and frequency of downgrading mechanisms. Differences between the two L1 groups are found to be statistically significant for all three of the categories investigated. In contrast, the heritage speakers differ significantly from their Mexican monolingual counterparts in the level of directness of the head act, producing Spanish requests more in line with the tendency in English to employ indirect strategies. Although the heritage speakers differ from the L1 Spanish group on this one dimension, the fact that they share other characteristics with both L1 groups suggests the existence of a unique intercultural style. The findings of this study also indicate that heritage speakers display many of the same characteristics as L2 learners reported in previous research.

Language Placement Exams for Heritage Speakers of Spanish: Learning from Students' Mistakes

Student admission into heritage language programs is usually determined by locally designed placement exams. Howevel; there are no norms to guide language teaching professionals in the assessment of this student population. This study looks at placement exams completed by heritage learners of Spanish at the University of Houston. The quantijication and analysis of the verb morphology section from this archival data describe the variation present in the linguistic systems of these learners, making it possible (1) to recognize gaps in the learners' linguistic systems and (2) to identijy major differences between academic Spanish and the students' home-variety language. This information may be useful in the design of a placement exam based on empirical research, and may also serve as a guide for syllabi design and teaching practice.

Bilingual education & bilingualism

Bilingual education & bilingualism

On the bilingual competence of Spanish heritage speakers: Syntax, lexical-semantics and processing

This study investigates the bilingual competence of adult simultaneous Spanish-English bilinguals living in the U.S. whose perceived weaker language is Spanish, and who are typically considered cases of language loss or incomplete acquisition. Potential Spanish language loss was assessed with respect to the grammar of monolingual Spanish speakers and with respect to the bilinguals' own competence in English, their perceived stronger language. The bilinguals took proficiency tests in Spanish and English. Four experiments tested the bilinguals' lexicosemantic and syntactic competence in Spanish and English. Experiments 1 and 2 used a Grammaticality Judgment Task in English and in Spanish to test syntactic and semantic aspects of unaccusative and unergative verbs, while Experiments 3 and 4 used an on-line visual probe recognition task to test semantic and syntactic aspects of these verbs in English and Spanish during sentence processing. Results of the linguistic and psycholinguistic measures show that despite self-perceptions and performance in the proficiency tests, the Spanish-English bilinguals were quite balanced in the two languages, and displayed robust knowledge of the syntactic effects of unaccusativity in English and Spanish. Variation from monolingual speakers was noticeable with the semantic classification of some verbs along the unaccusativity continuum (Sorace, 2000) as revealed in the Spanish tasks.

Second language acquisition and first language loss in adult early bilinguals: exploring some differences and similarities

This study compares the linguistic knowledge of adult second language (L2) learners, who learned the L2 after puberty, with the potentially ‘eroded’ first language (L1) grammars of adult early bilinguals who were exposed to the target language since birth and learned the other language simultaneously, or early in childhood (before age 5). I make two main claims: (1) that the L1 grammar of bilinguals at a given stabilized state (probably endstate) resembles the incomplete (either developing or stabilized) grammars typical of intermediate and advanced stages in L2 acquisition; and (2) that despite similar patterns of performance, when language proficiency is factored in, early bilinguals are better than the L2 learners, probably due to exposure to primary linguistic input early in childhood.I offer empirical evidence from an experimental study testing knowledge of the syntax and semantics of unaccusativity in Spanish, conducted with English-speaking L2 learners and English-dominant Spanish heritage speakers living in the USA. I consider recent treatments of unaccusativity and language attrition within the generative framework (Sorace, 1999; 2000a; 2000b), that offer a unifying account of the formal parallels observed between these two populations I discuss how input, use and age may explain differences and similarities in the linguistic attainment of the two groups.

Issues in Articulation for Heritage Language Speakers

Teaching heritage speakers of Spanish effectively is of major interest in the profession today, with increasing numbers of texts, research studies, articles, and conference presen tations being devoted to the factors involved. As Texas is one of the states with significant numbers of heritage students, the issue of teaching them well in Texas has been considered frequently in such outlets in recent years. The authors themselves have conducted several studies of various facets of teaching heritage speakers of Spanish in Texas, especially in higher education. In a recent inquiry for data pertaining to such instruction in secondary schools in the state, they determined that the state education agency has little information on the subject. Yet the issue is a very important one, since minority students already comprise half the state's students, and the majority ofthat cohort is Latino and of Spanish-speaking heritage. Therefore, they undertook to gather information on classes offered in the secondary schools of the state specifically for heritage speakers of Spanish (HSS), on placement procedures and tests, and on credit-by-examination procedures, with attendant determination of the implications of the findings for HSS students in Texas.

Subject and object expression in Spanish heritage speakers: A case of morphosyntactic convergence

Many simultaneous bilinguals exhibit loss or incomplete acquisition of their heritage language under conditions of exposure and use of the majority language (Silva-Corvalán, 1994, 2003; Polinsky, 1997; Toribio, 2001; Montrul, 2002). Recent work within discourse-functional (Silva-Corvalán 1994) and generative perspectives (Sorace, 2000; Montrul; 2002; Tsimpli, Sorace, Heycock, Filaci and Bouba, 2003, in press) suggests that while syntax proper is impervious to language loss or attrition, syntax-related interfaces like lexical-semantics and discourse-pragmatics are not. This study investigates argument expression in adult simultaneous bilinguals who are heritage speakers of Spanish, because in this language subjects, direct, and indirect objects are regulated by syntactic, pragmatic and semantic factors. It was hypothesized that if language loss affects interface areas of competence more than the purely syntactic domains, then Spanish heritage speakers should display robust knowledge of null subjects as well as object clitics, but variable behavior in the pragmatic distribution of null vs. overt subjects, the a preposition with animate direct objects, and cases of semantically based dative clitic-doubling. Results of an oral production task administered to 24 intermediate and advanced heritage speakers and 20 monolinguals confirmed the hypotheses. With the erosion of pragmatic and semantic features, the grammars of the intermediate proficiency Spanish heritage speakers appear to display morphosyntactic convergence with English in the expression of subject and object arguments.