The comprehension of tense-aspect morphology by Spanish heritage speakers in the United Kingdom
The comprehension of tense-aspect morphology by Spanish heritage speakers in the United Kingdom
Whilst heritage Spanish has been widely examined in the USA, less is known about the acquisition of Spanish in other English-dominant contexts such as the UK, and studies rarely assess the baseline grammar that heritage speakers are exposed to directly. In this study, we implemented a semantic interpretation task to 17 bilinguals in the UK to investigate child heritage speakers’ and their parents’ comprehension of the preterite–imperfect aspectual contrast in Spanish, an area of known difficulty. The results show that the parents are consistently more accurate in accepting and rejecting the appropriate morphemes than the children. Further analysis shows that children’s accuracy was best predicted by age at time of testing, suggesting that young heritage speakers of Spanish in the UK can acquire the target grammar. However, this general increase in accuracy with age was not found for the continuous reading of imperfective aspect. This finding implicates a more nuanced role of cross-linguistic influence in early heritage speakers’ grammar(s), and partially explains greater difficulty with the imperfect observed in production studies with other heritage speakers.
Heritage Spanish, Heritage language acquisition, Imperfect, Spanish in the United Kingdom, Tense–aspect morphology
Corbet, James
5b195b80-4d32-4eea-b542-d07471b82ed9
Dominguez, Laura
9c1bf2b4-b582-429b-9e8a-5264c4b7e63f
29 October 2020
Corbet, James
5b195b80-4d32-4eea-b542-d07471b82ed9
Dominguez, Laura
9c1bf2b4-b582-429b-9e8a-5264c4b7e63f
Corbet, James and Dominguez, Laura
(2020)
The comprehension of tense-aspect morphology by Spanish heritage speakers in the United Kingdom.
Languages, 5 (4), [46].
(doi:10.3390/languages5040046).
Abstract
Whilst heritage Spanish has been widely examined in the USA, less is known about the acquisition of Spanish in other English-dominant contexts such as the UK, and studies rarely assess the baseline grammar that heritage speakers are exposed to directly. In this study, we implemented a semantic interpretation task to 17 bilinguals in the UK to investigate child heritage speakers’ and their parents’ comprehension of the preterite–imperfect aspectual contrast in Spanish, an area of known difficulty. The results show that the parents are consistently more accurate in accepting and rejecting the appropriate morphemes than the children. Further analysis shows that children’s accuracy was best predicted by age at time of testing, suggesting that young heritage speakers of Spanish in the UK can acquire the target grammar. However, this general increase in accuracy with age was not found for the continuous reading of imperfective aspect. This finding implicates a more nuanced role of cross-linguistic influence in early heritage speakers’ grammar(s), and partially explains greater difficulty with the imperfect observed in production studies with other heritage speakers.
Text
Comprehension Tense-Aspect Spanish HS UK accepted proof
- Accepted Manuscript
Text
Corbet Dominguez 2020 Languages
- Version of Record
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Accepted/In Press date: 25 October 2020
e-pub ahead of print date: 28 October 2020
Published date: 29 October 2020
Keywords:
Heritage Spanish, Heritage language acquisition, Imperfect, Spanish in the United Kingdom, Tense–aspect morphology
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 444931
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/444931
ISSN: 2226-471X
PURE UUID: c2f03a94-e2b3-4413-8b4e-22de13a8beaf
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Date deposited: 12 Nov 2020 17:31
Last modified: 17 Mar 2024 03:01
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Author:
James Corbet
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