Morphology in Spanish heritage language grammars

Inflectional morphology is an area of vulnerability in heritage language grammars not fully acquired in childhood. Child and young adult heritage speakers of Spanish tend to simplify morphological forms and overextend default inflectional morphology to irregular forms. This chapter summarizes findings from studies on the nominal and verbal morphological competence of heritage speakers of Spanish in the United States and Europe. Heritage speakers are child and adult early bilinguals whose home language is a minority language in the larger society. Some of them were born into bilingual homes and were exposed to the home language and the societal majority language since birth, while others may have had a longer period of monolingualism in their home language with exposure to the majority language starting at school entrance. Spanish nouns are lexically classified into two major categories and marked by grammatical gender and number with affixal morphemes.