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Online processing of subject pronouns in monolingual and heritage bilingual speakers of Mexican Spanish*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 December 2014

GREGORY D. KEATING ,
JILL JEGERSKI  and
BILL VANPATTEN
GREGORY D. KEATING*
Affiliation:
San Diego State University
JILL JEGERSKI
Affiliation:
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
BILL VANPATTEN
Affiliation:
Michigan State University
*
Address for correspondence: Gregory D. Keating, Department of Linguistics and Asian/Middle Eastern Languages, San Diego State University, 5500 Campanile Dr., San Diego, CA 92182, USAgkeating@mail.sdsu.edu
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Abstract

In this self-paced reading study, we first tested the cross-linguistic validity of the position of antecedent strategy proposed for anaphora resolution in Italian (Carminati, 2002) in a Latin American variety of Spanish. We then examined the application of this strategy by Spanish heritage speakers of the same dialect who were largely English dominant. Forty-five monolingual speakers of Mexican Spanish and 28 Spanish heritage speakers of Mexican descent read sentences in which null and overt subject pronouns were biased for and against expected antecedent biases. Our results suggest that Mexican monolinguals display distinct antecedent biases for null and overt pronouns. Furthermore, the Spanish heritage speakers, though not monolingual-like, did not violate discourse constraints on the resolution of overt pronouns, contra the findings of offline research (see Keating, VanPatten & Jegerski, 2011). We discuss the findings in terms of a processing-based account.

Keywords

position of antecedent strategynull subjectsovert subjectsheritage speakersMexican Spanish
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , January 2016 , pp. 36 - 49
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

*

This research was funded by a Critical Thinking Grant in the Humanities and Social Sciences and a Microgrant for research travel awarded by the College of Arts and Letters at San Diego State University, for which we are grateful. We owe special thanks to Douglas Goodwin, Lisa Conaway, and Luis González Martínez of the University of Guanajuato for their warm hospitality and generous assistance during our data collection in Mexico. Versions of this work were presented at the 2012 Second Language Research Forum (Pittsburgh, PA), the 2013 joint conferences on Spanish in the US and Spanish in Contact with Other Languages (McAllen, TX), the 2013 Annual Conference of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (San Antonio, TX), and the 2014 Symposium on Spanish as a Heritage Language (Lubbock, TX). We are also grateful to three anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback and suggestions.

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