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THE CONTRIBUTION OF PSYCHOSOCIAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL VARIABLES TO HERITAGE LANGUAGE LEARNERS’ LINGUISTIC KNOWLEDGE OF SPANISH

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2019

Julio Torres Open the ORCID record for Julio Torres [Opens in a new window] ,
Ricardo Estremera  and
Sherez Mohamed
Julio Torres*
Affiliation:
University of California, Irvine
Ricardo Estremera
Affiliation:
State University of New York, Albany
Sherez Mohamed
Affiliation:
Florida State University
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Julio Torres, University of California, Irvine, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, 322 Humanities Hall, Irvine, CA 92697. E-mail: torresju@uci.edu
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Abstract

Individual differences (IDs) largely contribute to success in adult second language attainment (e.g., Dörnyei, 2006). Heritage language (HL) studies have also explored the role of IDs, namely psychosocial variables, and biographical factors with an adult HL learner population. However, the specific contribution of these variables to HL learners' performance on linguistic tests that differ in degree of explicitness and modality remains unknown. Therefore, the current study tested 103 adult HL learners of Spanish who completed a spoken elicited imitation task (EIT) and a written untimed grammaticality judgment task (UGJT) that elicited their knowledge of vulnerable morphosyntactic structures in HL bilingual acquisition. To investigate the contribution of individual learner factors on their performance, participants completed a few questionnaires. Mixed-effects regression models revealed that sequential bilingual status, willingness to communicate, generation and motivation contributed significantly, but yet differentially to participants' performance on grammatical and ungrammatical items of the EIT and UGJT.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 41 , Issue 4 , September 2019 , pp. 695 - 719
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

We would like to thank Nick Pandža and Bianca Cung for their guidance with statistical analyses. We are also grateful for the helpful comments from the SSLA editors and anonymous reviewers that improved upon the earlier version of the manuscript. All remaining errors are our own.

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