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Early language experience facilitates the processing of gender agreement in Spanish heritage speakers*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 April 2013
Abstract
We examined how age of acquisition in Spanish heritage speakers and L2 learners interacts with implicitness vs. explicitness of tasks in gender processing of canonical and non-canonical ending nouns. Twenty-three Spanish native speakers, 29 heritage speakers, and 33 proficiency-matched L2 learners completed three on-line spoken word recognition experiments involving gender monitoring, grammaticality judgment, and word repetition. All three experimental tasks required participants to listen to grammatical and ungrammatical Spanish noun phrases (determiner–adjective–noun) but systematically varied the type of response required of them. The results of the Gender Monitoring Task (GMT) and the Grammaticality Judgment Task (GJT) revealed significant grammaticality effects for all groups in accuracy and speed, but in the Word Repetition Task (WRT), the native speakers and the heritage speakers showed a grammaticality effect, while the L2 learners did not. Noun canonicity greatly affected processing in the two experimental groups. We suggest that input frequency and reduced language use affect retrieval of non-canonical ending nouns from declarative memory in L2 learners and heritage speakers more so than in native speakers. Native-like processing of gender in the WRT by the heritage speakers is likely related to context of acquisition and particular experience with oral production.
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- This is a work of the U.S. Government and is not subject to copyright protection in the United States.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013
Footnotes
This study was supported by internal funds from the University of Illinois, for which we are grateful. We thank all the students who participated in our experiments, as well as the undergraduate research assistants Celeste Larkin, Kayla Pennoyer, Adam Bethune and Rachel Pirovano for their help in setting up the experiments and running subjects. Earlier versions of this work were presented at the 2010 Hispanic Linguistics Symposium at Indiana University, at the 2011 Workshop on Heritage Languages at Harvard University, at EUROSLA 2011 in Stockholm, at the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese colloquium at the University of Illinois (November 2011), at the 2012 Heritage Language Summer Institute at UCLA and at the Psycholingusitics Supper series at the CUNY Graduate Center in October 2012. We are grateful to all the audiences in these venues for their helpful comments and feedback. We are also grateful to Carmen Silva-Corvalán and to the three anonymous reviewers who kindly provided very useful comments and suggestions.
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