TY - JOUR
T1 - Language Experience Affects Comprehension of Spanish Passive Clauses: A Study of Heritage Speakers and Second Language Learners
AU - Sánchez Walker, Noelia
AU - Montrul, Silvina
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgments: This research was partly funded by a UIUC Department of Spanish and Portuguese Summer Research Fellowship. We are thankful to Maria Lux and Maggie Shuo Feng who created and digitally traced drawings, and to Cristina Mostacero Pinilla for her help as an interrater for the oral narratives. We also thank the Second Language Acquisition and Bilingualism (SLAB) Lab at UIUC where most testing took place, and the Illinois Phonetics & Phonology Lab at UIUC where most of the audio files were graciously recorded by Gerardo Villalobos and Héctor G. Arce. We sincerely thank the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of our manuscript and helpful comments and suggestions. All errors remain our own.
PY - 2021/3
Y1 - 2021/3
N2 - Heritage language (HL) learners of Spanish have shown better command with early acquired aspects of grammar than second language (L2) learners, mainly in oral tasks. This study investigates whether this advantage persists with passive clauses, structures acquired early but mastered during the school-age years, with literacy. We examined adjectival passives (La comida estaba servida, “Dinner was served”) with the copula estar in the imperfect, which refer to a description of a state or a final result; and verbal passives with the copula ser in the imperfect (La comida era servida. “Dinner was being served”), which refer to an ongoing or habitual action in the past. A grammaticality judgment task (GJT) testing knowledge of the copulas in different simple sentences and a picture-matching task (PMT) testing the comprehension of the two passive clauses revealed that HL learners’ knowledge of the copulas resembles that of literate monolingually raised native speakers more than that of L2 learners. HL learners are able to integrate their knowledge of the copulas to comprehend syntactically complex clauses, especially in the aural modality.
AB - Heritage language (HL) learners of Spanish have shown better command with early acquired aspects of grammar than second language (L2) learners, mainly in oral tasks. This study investigates whether this advantage persists with passive clauses, structures acquired early but mastered during the school-age years, with literacy. We examined adjectival passives (La comida estaba servida, “Dinner was served”) with the copula estar in the imperfect, which refer to a description of a state or a final result; and verbal passives with the copula ser in the imperfect (La comida era servida. “Dinner was being served”), which refer to an ongoing or habitual action in the past. A grammaticality judgment task (GJT) testing knowledge of the copulas in different simple sentences and a picture-matching task (PMT) testing the comprehension of the two passive clauses revealed that HL learners’ knowledge of the copulas resembles that of literate monolingually raised native speakers more than that of L2 learners. HL learners are able to integrate their knowledge of the copulas to comprehend syntactically complex clauses, especially in the aural modality.
KW - Bilingualism
KW - Heritage language acquisition
KW - Later language development
KW - Passives
KW - Second language acquisi-tion
KW - Spanish
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U2 - 10.3390/languages6010002
DO - 10.3390/languages6010002
M3 - Article
SN - 2226-471X
VL - 6
SP - 1
EP - 41
JO - Languages
JF - Languages
IS - 1
M1 - 2
ER -