Journal ArticleDOI
Who Was Walking on the Beach? Anaphora Resolution in Spanish Heritage Speakers and Adult Second Language Learners.
TLDR
This article conducted a study to determine whether adult early Spanish-English bilinguals and late English-Spanish bilinguals (adult second language learners of Spanish) utilize the same antecedent assignment strategies as monolingually raised Spanish speakers, and whether early exposure to and use of Spanish confers advantages to Spanish heritage speakers relative to L2 learners.Abstract:
The position of antecedent strategy (Carminati, 2002) claims that speakers of null-subject languages prefer to resolve intrasentential anaphora by linking pro to an antecedent in the specifier of the inflection phrase and the overt pronoun to an antecedent lower in the clause. The present study has two aims: (a) to determine whether adult early Spanish-English bilinguals (Spanish heritage speakers) and late English-Spanish bilinguals (adult second language [L2] learners of Spanish) utilize the same antecedent assignment strategies as monolingually raised Spanish speakers, and (b) to determine whether early exposure to and use of Spanish confers advantages to Spanish heritage speakers relative to L2 learners. Spanish speakers raised without English contact (n = 19), Spanish heritage speakers (n = 25), and L2 learners of Spanish (n = 19) completed an offline questionnaire that comprised complex sentences such as Juan vio a Carlos mientras pro/el caminaba en la playa “John saw Charles while he was walking on the beach.” Comprehension questions probed participants’ preferences regarding the antecedent of null and overt pronouns. The results indicate that the monolingually raised Spanish speakers showed an antecedent bias, but the heritage speakers and the L2 learners did not. Furthermore, the two groups of bilinguals differed from the controls in different ways: The heritage speakers displayed a stronger subject bias for the overt pronoun, whereas the L2 learners did not exhibit any clear antecedent biases.read more
Citations
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Book
The Acquisition of Heritage Languages
TL;DR: The acquisition of heritage languages has become a central focus of study within linguistics and applied linguistics as discussed by the authors, focusing on the grammatical development of the heritage language and the language learning trajectory of heritage speakers.
Book
Heritage Languages and their Speakers
TL;DR: This book provides a pioneering introduction to heritage languages and their speakers, written by one of the founders of this new field, and offers analysis of resilient and vulnerable domains in heritage languages, with a special emphasis on recurrent structural properties that occur across multiple heritage languages.
Book Chapter
Gaps in Second Language Sentence Processing
TL;DR: This finding is argued to support the hypothesis that nonnative comprehenders underuse syntactic information in L2 processing and to associate the fronted wh-phrase directly with its lexical subcategorizer, regardless of whether the subjacency constraint was operative in their native language.
Journal ArticleDOI
Is the heritage language like a second language
TL;DR: This paper found that exposure to the family language since birth even under reduced input conditions leads to more native-like linguistic knowledge in heritage speakers as opposed to L2 learners with a later age of acquisition of the language, and whether formal instruction in the classroom is beneficial to heritage speakers.
Journal ArticleDOI
Understanding heritage languages
Maria Polinsky,Gregory Scontras +1 more
TL;DR: The authors identify three outcomes of deviation in the heritage grammar: avoidance of ambiguity, a resistance to irregularity, and a shrinking of structure, and highlight two key triggers for deviation from the relevant baseline: the quantity and quality of the input from which the heritage language is acquired, and the economy of online resources when operating in a less dominant language.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Handbook of second language acquisition
William C. Ritchie,Tej K. Bhatia +1 more
TL;DR: This review concludes that the current state of second language acquisition in the United States is likely to be worse than in previous years, due to the combination of language barriers and the high level of adoption of English as a second language.
Reference BookDOI
The handbook of second language acquisition
TL;DR: The scope of inquiry and goals of SLA are discussed in this article, with a focus on the development of lexical and conceptual representations of the SLA language model and its application in the context of Bilingual Language Learning.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Language Experience and Proficiency Questionnaire (LEAP-Q): assessing language profiles in bilinguals and multilinguals.
TL;DR: The LEAP-Q is a valid, reliable, and efficient tool for assessing the language profiles of multilingual, neurologically intact adult populations in research settings.
Journal ArticleDOI
Grammatical Processing in Language Learners.
Harald Clahsen,Claudia Felser +1 more
TL;DR: This paper conducted a detailed study of grammatical processing in language learners using experimental psycholinguistic techniques and comparing different populations (mature native speakers, child first language [L1] and adult second language learners] as well as different domains of language (morphology and syntax).
Book
Incomplete Acquisition in Bilingualism: Re-examining the Age Factor
TL;DR: This paper examined the structural characteristics of "incomplete" grammatical states and highlighted how age of acquisition is related to the type of linguistic knowledge and behavior that emerges in L1 and L2 acquisition under different environmental circumstances.