Article published in:
Psycholinguistic approaches to production and comprehension in bilingual adults and childrenEdited by Maialen Iraola Azpiroz, Shanley E.M. Allen, Kalliopi Katsika and Leigh Fernandez
[Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 9:4/5] 2019
► pp. 659–686
Child heritage speakers’ production and comprehension of direct object clitic gender in Spanish
Naomi Shin | University of New Mexico
Barbara Rodríguez | University of New Mexico
Aja Armijo | University of New Mexico
Molly Perara-Lunde | University of New Mexico
This study investigates 37 child heritage speakers’ direct object (DO) clitics in Spanish. Results from a production task show that DO expression versus omission was related to Spanish vocabulary: the lower the vocabulary score, the more omitted DOs. In contrast, DO clitic gender was related to English: children who used more English in the home and who had higher English vocabulary scores produced more gender mismatches, most notably lo referring to feminine referents. Results from a comprehension task suggest that children do not attend to clitic gender for referent identification. We argue that the disambiguation function of DO clitic gender, which is infrequent in discourse, may take a long time to develop. Overall, the study suggests that the extent to which restricted input and crosslinguistic influence affect child heritage speakers’ minority language grammar may be mediated by the nature of the linguistic phenomenon in question.
Keywords: clitic gender, direct object clitics, child heritage speakers, heritage language acquisition, Spanish-English bilingualism
Published online: 09 October 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.17029.shi
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.17029.shi
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Azpiroz, Maialen Iraola, Shanley E. M. Allen, Kalliopi Katsika & Leigh Fernandez
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