Silvina Montrul
Biographic Data
| ID | 453428 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Silvina Montrul |
| GIVEN NAMES | Silvina |
| FAMILY NAME | Montrul |
| SIGNATURE | MONTRUL S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6011-5959 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 76 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 348 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 75 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Does structural priming lead to contact-induced language change: Evidence from subject pronoun expression in Spanish–English bilinguals
Subject pronoun expression (SPE) has been extensively investigated in studies of language contact, with studies finding higher rates of SPE in consistent null subject languages that are in contact with non-null subject languages. Recent studies have explored the role of structural priming in these processes of language change by analyzing different language pairs and societal contexts. We contribute to this line of research by examining the role …
Variation along the referentiality scale in the production of Spanish differential object marking by monolingual and bilingual children
The Development of Basque Subject Pronoun Expression in Bilingual School-Age Children
Acquiring full mastery of the pragmatic constraints regulating null/overt pronominal subjects in null subject languages like Basque is a prolonged and cognitively taxing process because pronominal distribution is pragmatically conditioned in discourse. The purpose of this study is to elucidate the acquisition of subject pronoun expression (henceforth, SPE) by school-age Basque-speaking children because Basque has a gender-neutral third-person sin…
Input factors in the acquisition of evidentiality by Turkish heritage language children and adults in the United States
Aspectual and mood morphology are vulnerable domains in adult heritage speakers. This paper investigates the root of such vulnerability within the domain of Turkish evidentiality system by comparing 20 second-generation adult and 20 school-age child Turkish heritage speakers to 20 first-generation immigrants (main input providers for child heritage speakers) residing in the United States. A monolingual group from Turkey including 20 monolingual a…
Regional language as heritage languages
Aims and objectives: Heritage languages are commonly spoken by immigrants and their children, but they can also be spoken in their own territories when national regional languages and indigenous languages share space with a majority language. This study discusses how the terms heritage language and heritage speakers may apply to situations of stable bilingualism, such as historical minority languages and aboriginal languages. Approach: The study …
The impact of L1 literacy on the production of Spanish verbal passives by school-age Spanish heritage speakers
Acquiring literacy contributes to monolingual children's language development, especially with the oral production of complex sentences. However, less is known about how written language exposure impacts first language (L1) morphosyntactic growth in Spanish-speaking children in the U.S., who are educated in their second language (L2) and have little opportunities to develop L1 literacy. To investigate this, we evaluated 8–12-year-old Spanish heri…
Is structural priming a possible mechanism of language change in heritage language grammars? Some evidence from accusative clitic doubling in Spanish
The language of heritage speakers is characterized by variability and structural innovations compared to the baseline grammar of first-generation immigrants. Although many factors contribute to these differences, this study considers structural priming with structures that do not exist in the majority language as a potential mechanism for language change. The linguistic focus is accusative clitic doubling, which exists in some Spanish varieties, …
Intergenerational attrition: Direct or reverse language transmission
It has been suggested that the parents of heritage speakers (2nd generation immigrants), who are the main source of input to them, may exhibit first-language (L1) attrition in their language, thereby directly transmitting different structural properties or “errors” to the heritage speakers. Given the state of current knowledge of inconsistent input in L1 acquisition, age of acquisition effects in bilingualism, and how long it takes children to ma…
Activating L1-attrition: A priming experiment
The Attrition via Acquisition (AvA) model unifies acquisition and attrition by proposing that intake to the inference engine can come from the first language (L1) or the second language (L2). What this model does not specify, however, is the specific psycholinguistic mechanisms that can lead to attrition nor how partial representation may come about. This study expands the AvA model by incorporating activation as a key mechanism and precursor to …
The Role of Determiners in the Processing of Gender Agreement Morphology by Heritage Speakers of Spanish
This eye-tracking study examined how heritage speakers of Spanish process gender agreement morphology at a distance, focusing on the activation of the gender feature during sentence processing. Previous work is conceptually replicated and further extended by assessing (1) whether reduced sensitivity to gender agreement mismatches when another word intervenes between the head noun and its modifying adjective stems from weakened gender feature acti…
How Flexible Are Grammars Past Puberty? The Case of Relative Clauses in Turkish-American Returnees
How flexible are grammars after puberty? To answer this, we test returnees: heritage speakers (HS) born in an immigration context who returned to their homeland in later years. If returnees are targetlike, then language is still malleable after puberty; in contrast, if maturational effects are in play, postpuberty returnees will show variability. Thirty-two Turkish-American returnees, 30 Turkish HS in the United States, and 30 monolinguals comple…
Relative clauses in child heritage speakers of Turkish in the United States
How does complex syntax develop in heritage language children? This study investigates child Turkish heritage speakers’ comprehension and production of relative clauses (RCs) in Turkish and in English. RCs vary on their syntactic functions (subject, object) and show asymmetric patterns of acquisition and processing, which have been explained by linear distance, structural distance and input factors. Thirty-two child Turkish HS (ages 6–15) and 48 …
The Role of Language Experience in the Acquisition of Spanish Gender Agreement: A Study with Nonce Nouns
Why is learning the gender of nouns so difficult for some bilinguals? We test the hypothesis that different language learning backgrounds or life experience with Spanish determine how learners follow different morphosyntactic cues for gender assignment in Spanish by testing learners with early and late language experience in an experiment with invented nouns. A total of 44 monolingually raised native speakers, 44 heritage speakers, and 44 L2 lear…
Does your regional variety help you acquire an additional language: Spanish differential object marking in Northern and Southern Italians
This study investigates Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Italian speakers from two dialectal areas–North and South Italy–learning Spanish. Southern Italo-Romance varieties exhibit a DOM system through a- marking, like Spanish, whereas the Northern varieties, like Standard Italian, only allow DOM with pronouns. Given the structural differences and similarities among these typologically close languages, we ask whether a stigmatized oral regiona…
Sources of variability in the acquisition of Differential Object Marking by Turkish heritage language children in the United States
Differential object marking (DOM) is an area of vulnerability in adult heritage speakers. This study traces such vulnerability to childhood by examining Turkish DOM in child Turkish heritage speakers in the U.S and the parental generation, who are the main input providers. Twenty first-generation immigrants, 20 adult and 20 child (aged 7–14) Turkish heritage speakers, and the monolingual group including 20 Turkish-speaking adults, 20 7–14-year-ol…
Heritage Languages: Language Acquired, Language Lost, Language Regained
A heritage language is a sociopolitically minority and/or minoritized language acquired as the first or one of the first languages in a bilingual or multilingual context. Heritage languages are typically acquired under conditions of reduced exposure and are often used less than the majority language during late childhood and adolescence. Heritage languages show structural differences and changes at all levels of linguistic analysis from baseline …
The Cambridge Handbook of Heritage Languages and Linguistics
Heritage languages are minority languages learned in a bilingual environment. These include immigrant languages, aboriginal or indigenous languages and historical minority languages. In the last two decades, heritage languages have become central to many areas of linguistic research, from bilingual language acquisition, education and language policies, to theoretical linguistics. Bringing together contributions from a team of internationally reno…
Priming Dative Clitics in Spoken Spanish as a Second and Heritage Language
Spanish monolingual speakers often produce recipient ( Pedro le da un lápiz a María ) and nonrecipient constructions ( Antonio le lava la camiseta a Carmen ) doubled by a dative clitic. Second language speakers and heritage speakers usually avoid clitics. This study examined whether structural priming could effectively increase the production of clitics in monolingual speakers ( N = 23), L2 speakers ( N = 28), and heritage speakers ( N = 24). Par…
Representational and Computational Changes in Heritage Language Grammars
The notion of complexity has been applied to descriptions and comparisons of languages and to explanations related to ease and difficulty of various linguistic phenomena in first and second language acquisition. It has been noted that compared to baseline grammars, heritage language grammars are less complex, displaying morphological simplification and structural shrinking, especially among heritage speakers with lower proficiency in the language…
Psycholinguistic Evidence for Incipient Language Change in Mexican Spanish: The Extension of Differential Object Marking
Spanish marks animate and specific direct objects overtly with the preposition a, an instance of Differential Object Marking (DOM). However, in some varieties of Spanish, DOM is advancing to inanimate objects. Language change starts at the individual level, but how does it start? What manifestation of linguistic knowledge does it affect? This study traced this innovative use of DOM in oral production, grammaticality judgments and on-line comprehe…
Vulnerability and stability of Differential Object Marking in Romanian heritage speakers
Differential Object Marking (DOM) marks some objects overtly with specific morphology and is regulated by several semantic and pragmatic factors. DOM exhibits synchronic and diachronic variability within and across languages, especially in bilingual contexts, and the study of heritage languages offers a unique perspective on the forces that shape it. This study investigates knowledge of DOM in Romanian and its interaction with accusative clitic d…
Variational Learning in Child L2 Acquisition? Comprehension of Verbal Agreement in Spanish and English
The Spanish verbal system offers more evidence for agreement and tense than English, where morphological evidence is less robust. With a focus on the comprehension of verbal agreement morphology by child second (L2) learners of Spanish and English, we extend the Variational Learning account to L2 acquisition to investigate whether the abundance of morphological evidence for subject agreement in the target language contributes to the rate of acqui…
Language Experience Affects Comprehension of Spanish Passive Clauses: A Study of Heritage Speakers and Second Language Learners
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, whi…
Assessing Rhotic Production by Bilingual Spanish Speakers
Due to its articulatory precision, the Spanish rhotic system is generally acquired in late childhood by monolingually-raised (L1) Spanish speakers. Heritage speakers and second language (L2) learners, unlike L1 speakers, risk an incomplete acquisition of the rhotic system due to limited Spanish input and possible phonological interference from English. In order to examine the effects of age of onset of bilingualism and cross-linguistic influence …
An experimental investigation of differential object marking in Mexican Spanish
Differential Object Marking (DOM) is a phenomenon widely attested in Spanish. In two experimental studies using production and acceptability judgments we examined the extent to which Mexican Spanish presents some variation among monolingual speakers with respect to expansion of DOM. We tested whether DOM with animate and specific objects is categorical in this variety, and whether DOM is expanding to inanimate definite and indefinite objects as o…
Heritage languages and their speakers: Opportunities and challenges for linguistics
In this paper, we bring to the attention of the linguistic community recent research on heritage languages. Shifting linguistic attention from the model of a monolingual speaker to the model of a multilingual speaker is important for the advancement of our understanding of the language faculty. Native speaker competence is typically the result of normal first language acquisition in an environment where the native language is dominant in various …
Gender Agreement in Adult Second Language Learners and Spanish Heritage Speakers: The Effects of Age and Context of Acquisition
This study investigates knowledge of gender agreement in Spanish L2 learners and heritage speakers, who differ in age and context/mode of acquisition. On some current theoretical accounts, persistent difficulty with grammatical gender in adult L2 acquisition is due to age. These accounts predict that heritage speakers should be more accurate on gender agreement than L2 learners, because their Spanish language acquisition started in infancy. Sixty…
Back to basics: Incomplete knowledge of Differential Object Marking in Spanish heritage speakers
The obligatory use of the preposition a with animate, specific direct objects in Spanish (Juan conoce a María "Juan knows Maria") is a well-known instance of Differential Object Marking (DOM; Torrego, 1998; Leonetti, 2004). Recent studies have documented the loss and/or incomplete acquisition of several grammatical features in Spanish heritage speakers (Silva-Corvalán, 1994; Montrul, 2002), including DOM (Montrul, 2004a). This study assesses the …
Second language acquisition and first language loss in adult early bilinguals: Exploring some differences and similarities
This study compares the linguistic knowledge of adult second language (L2) learners, who learned the L2 after puberty, with the potentially ‘eroded’ first language (L1) grammars of adult early bilinguals who were exposed to the target language since birth and learned the other language simultaneously, or early in childhood (before age 5). I make two main claims: (1) that the L1 grammar of bilinguals at a given stabilized state (probably endstate)…
Multiple interfaces and incomplete acquisition
Clitics and object expression in the L3 acquisition of Brazilian Portuguese: Structural similarity matters for transfer
This article addresses the role of previously acquired languages in the acquisition of a third language (L3) in two experimental studies on object expression in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). Participants were English-speaking learners of BP as L3 with knowledge of Spanish as a second language (L2) and Spanish-speaking learners of BP with knowledge of English as L2. Like Spanish, BP has object clitic pronouns, but there are important differences betw…
Differential object marking in Spanish, Hindi, and Romanian as heritage languages
Erosion of differential object marking (DOM)-the overt morphological marking of animate direct objects-has been observed in Spanish heritage speakers who are second-generation immigrants in the United States (Montrul 2004, Montrul & Bowles 2009). We investigated whether DOM is similarly vulnerable in heritage speakers of Hindi and Romanian, two other languages that also exhibit DOM, as well as in first-generation immigrants, adults who are presum…
Dominant language transfer in adult second language learners and heritage speakers
The effects of language transfer have been amply documented in second language (L2) acquisition and, to a lesser extent, in the language contact/loss literature (Cook, 2003). In both cases, the stronger and often dominant language encroaches into the structure of the less dominant language in systematic ways. But are transfer effects in these two situations comparable: is first language (L1) influence in adult L2 learners similar to L2 influence …
Heritage Languages: Language Acquired, Language Lost, Language Regained
A heritage language is a sociopolitically minority and/or minoritized language acquired as the first or one of the first languages in a bilingual or multilingual context. Heritage languages are typically acquired under conditions of reduced exposure and are often used less than the majority language during late childhood and adolescence. Heritage languages show structural differences and changes at all levels of linguistic analysis from baseline …
The role of experience in the acquisition and production of diminutives and gender in Spanish: Evidence from L2 learners and heritage speakers
This study examined whether type of early language experience provides advantages to heritage speakers over second language (L2) learners with morphology, and investigated knowledge of gender agreement and its interaction with diminutive formation. Diminutives are a hallmark of Child Directed Speech in early language development and a highly productive morphological mechanism that facilitates the acquisition of declensional noun endings in many l…
Structural changes in Spanish in the United States: Differential object marking in Spanish heritage speakers across generations
First-language-constrained variability in the second-language acquisition of argument-structure-changing morphology with causative verbs
This article presents three related experiments on the acquisition of two classes of causative verbs: physical change of state verbs with agentive subjects (e.g., English break) and psychological change of state verbs with experiencer objects (e.g., English frighten) in English, Spanish and Turkish as second languages by speakers whose native languages are English, Spanish, Turkish and Japanese. These verbs participate in the causative/inchoative…
The Role of L1 Transfer in the Interpretation of Articles with Definite Plurals in L2 English: Role of L1 Transfer in the Interpretation of Articles
This study examines second language (L2) acquisition of the interpretation of plural noun phrases. Languages with articles differ in whether they use bare plurals (English) or definite plurals (Spanish) to express generic interpretation (Chierchia, 1998; Dayal, 2004; among others). It is hypothesized that Spanish-speaking learners of English transfer the interpretation of definite plurals from their native language. Results of a truth-value judgm…
Causative errors with unaccusative verbs in L2 Spanish
Unaccusative verbs do not form a homogeneous class with respect to the syntactic constructions in which they may appear. Change of state unaccusatives alternate in transitivity ( romper ‘break’), others have a suppletive causative counterpart for the transitive variant ( morir-matar ‘diekill’), while still others do not alternate and do not have lexically unrelated counterparts ( escapar ‘escape’). It has been documented that L1 and L2 learners o…
On knowledge and development of unaccusativity in Spanish L2 acquisition
Many studies have reported that L2 learners have persistent problems with unaccusative verbs in English, Japanese, Italian, French, and Chinese. Oshita (2001) proposed the ‘‘unaccusative trap hypothesis’’ (UTH) to account for the observed developmental trends crosslinguistically. According to the UTH, initially, L2 learners assume that all intransitive verbs are unergatives. At intermediate and advanced stages, learners realize that unaccusative …
An experimental investigation of the expression of genericity in English, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese
Clitic placement in L2 French: Evidence from sentence matching
In this paper, we argue in favour of the NO IMPAIRMENT HYPOTHESIS , whereby L2 functional categories, features and feature values are attainable, and against the NO PARAMETER RESETTING HYPOTHESIS , according to which L2 learners are restricted to L1 categories and features, as well as against the LOCAL IMPAIRMENT HYPOTHESIS , which claims that the interlanguage grammar is characterized by inert feature values. An online experiment was conducted, …
Psycholinguistic Evidence for Incipient Language Change in Mexican Spanish: The Extension of Differential Object Marking
Spanish marks animate and specific direct objects overtly with the preposition a, an instance of Differential Object Marking (DOM). However, in some varieties of Spanish, DOM is advancing to inanimate objects. Language change starts at the individual level, but how does it start? What manifestation of linguistic knowledge does it affect? This study traced this innovative use of DOM in oral production, grammaticality judgments and on-line comprehe…
Language Experience Affects Comprehension of Spanish Passive Clauses: A Study of Heritage Speakers and Second Language Learners
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, whi…
Assessing Rhotic Production by Bilingual Spanish Speakers
Due to its articulatory precision, the Spanish rhotic system is generally acquired in late childhood by monolingually-raised (L1) Spanish speakers. Heritage speakers and second language (L2) learners, unlike L1 speakers, risk an incomplete acquisition of the rhotic system due to limited Spanish input and possible phonological interference from English. In order to examine the effects of age of onset of bilingualism and cross-linguistic influence …
Learning datives: The Tolerance Principle in monolingual and bilingual acquisition
We study the learnability problem concerning the dative alternations in English (Baker, 1979; Pinker, 1989). We consider how first language learners productively apply the double-object and to-dative constructions ( give the book to library/ give the library the book), while excluding negative exceptions ( donate the book to the library/* donate the library the book). Our solution for first language acquisition is based on The Tolerance Principle…
Attrition, addition, and age
Putting parameters in their proper place
Seeing the logical problem of second language acquisition as that of primarily selecting and re-assembling bundles of features anew, Lardiere proposes to dispense with the deductive learning approach and its broad range of consequences subsumed under the concept of parameters. While we agree that feature assembly captures more precisely the complexity of the form—meaning mapping task in second language acquisition, we disagree with the dismissal …
Causatives and Transitivity in L2 English
This study investigates whether Spanish- and Turkish-speaking learners of English discover the semantic and syntactic constraints on the causative/inchoative alternation in the absence of overt morphological clues. Results of a Picture Judgment Task show that L2 learners do discover these properties, and that overall verbs appear to cluster in classes in their interlanguage grammars. However, the Turkish group, at a lower proficiency level than t…
The L2 acquisition of dative experiencer subjects
This longitudinal experimental study is concerned with the L2 acquisition of argument structure and its relationship with Case Theory. French ( n = 17) and English ( n = 19) intermediate learners of Spanish as a Second Language were tested three times over a period of eight months on their knowledge of dative experiencers. Eighteen Spanish native speakers acted as a control group. Dative experiencers in Spanish are common with a subset of psych v…
The L2 acquisition of dative experiencer subjects
This longitudinal experimental study is concerned with the L2 acquisition of argument structure and its relationship with Case Theory. French ( n = 17) and English ( n = 19) intermediate learners of Spanish as a Second Language were tested three times over a period of eight months on their knowledge of dative experiencers. Eighteen Spanish native speakers acted as a control group. Dative experiencers in Spanish are common with a subset of psych v…
The L2 acquisition of Spanish: Generative perspectives
Causative errors with unaccusative verbs in L2 Spanish
Unaccusative verbs do not form a homogeneous class with respect to the syntactic constructions in which they may appear. Change of state unaccusatives alternate in transitivity ( romper ‘break’), others have a suppletive causative counterpart for the transitive variant ( morir-matar ‘diekill’), while still others do not alternate and do not have lexically unrelated counterparts ( escapar ‘escape’). It has been documented that L1 and L2 learners o…
First-language-constrained variability in the second-language acquisition of argument-structure-changing morphology with causative verbs
First-language-constrained variability in the second-language acquisition of argument-structure-changing morphology with causative verbs
This article presents three related experiments on the acquisition of two classes of causative verbs: physical change of state verbs with agentive subjects (e.g., English break) and psychological change of state verbs with experiencer objects (e.g., English frighten) in English, Spanish and Turkish as second languages by speakers whose native languages are English, Spanish, Turkish and Japanese. These verbs participate in the causative/inchoative…
Causatives and Transitivity in L2 English
This study investigates whether Spanish- and Turkish-speaking learners of English discover the semantic and syntactic constraints on the causative/inchoative alternation in the absence of overt morphological clues. Results of a Picture Judgment Task show that L2 learners do discover these properties, and that overall verbs appear to cluster in classes in their interlanguage grammars. However, the Turkish group, at a lower proficiency level than t…
Incomplete acquisition and attrition of Spanish tense/aspect distinctions in adult bilinguals
This study investigates whether age of onset of bilingualism has an effect on ultimate attainment, and documents incomplete acquisition and attrition of tense/aspect morphology in Spanish. A group of 20 monolingual Spanish speakers, 31 US-born bilinguals, and 8 Latin America-born bilinguals participated in the study. Sixteen of the US-born participants were simultaneous bilinguals who had been exposed to Spanish and English from ages 0 to 3, the …
Clitic placement in L2 French: Evidence from sentence matching
In this paper, we argue in favour of the NO IMPAIRMENT HYPOTHESIS , whereby L2 functional categories, features and feature values are attainable, and against the NO PARAMETER RESETTING HYPOTHESIS , according to which L2 learners are restricted to L1 categories and features, as well as against the LOCAL IMPAIRMENT HYPOTHESIS , which claims that the interlanguage grammar is characterized by inert feature values. An online experiment was conducted, …
Competence Similarities Between Native and Near-Native Speakers: An Investigation of the Preterite-Imperfect Contrast in Spanish
It has been suggested that tense and aspect distributions are very difficult to learn in a second language (L2), they are prone to fossilize universally, and their interpretive properties are subject to a critical period (Coppieters, 1987). This study focuses on the acquisition of the semantic implications of the preterite-imperfect contrast in Spanish by English-speaking individuals of very advanced proficiency in Spanish who were not living in …
The Acquisition of Spanish: Morphosyntactic development in monolingual and bilingual L1 acquisition and adult L2 acquisition
This is the first book on the acquisition of Spanish that provides a state-of-the-art comprehensive overview of Spanish morphosyntactic development in monolingual and bilingual situations. Its content is organized around key grammatical themes that form the empirical base of research in generative grammar: nominal and verbal inflectional morphology, subject and object pronouns, complex structures involving movement (topicalizations, questions, re…
Subject and object expression in Spanish heritage speakers: A case of morphosyntactic convergence
Many simultaneous bilinguals exhibit loss or incomplete acquisition of their heritage language under conditions of exposure and use of the majority language (Silva-Corvalán, 1994, 2003; Polinsky, 1997; Toribio, 2001; Montrul, 2002). Recent work within discourse-functional (Silva-Corvalán 1994) and generative perspectives (Sorace, 2000; Montrul; 2002; Tsimpli, Sorace, Heycock, Filaci and Bouba, 2003, in press) suggests that while syntax proper is …
Second language acquisition and first language loss in adult early bilinguals: Exploring some differences and similarities
This study compares the linguistic knowledge of adult second language (L2) learners, who learned the L2 after puberty, with the potentially ‘eroded’ first language (L1) grammars of adult early bilinguals who were exposed to the target language since birth and learned the other language simultaneously, or early in childhood (before age 5). I make two main claims: (1) that the L1 grammar of bilinguals at a given stabilized state (probably endstate)…
The Acquisition of Spanish: Morphosyntactic Development in Monolingual and Bilingual L1 Acquisition and Adult L2 Acquisition
On knowledge and development of unaccusativity in Spanish L2 acquisition
Many studies have reported that L2 learners have persistent problems with unaccusative verbs in English, Japanese, Italian, French, and Chinese. Oshita (2001) proposed the ‘‘unaccusative trap hypothesis’’ (UTH) to account for the observed developmental trends crosslinguistically. According to the UTH, initially, L2 learners assume that all intransitive verbs are unergatives. At intermediate and advanced stages, learners realize that unaccusative …
On the bilingual competence of Spanish heritage speakers: Syntax, lexical-semantics and processing
This study investigates the bilingual competence of adult simultaneous Spanish-English bilinguals living in the U.S. whose perceived weaker language is Spanish, and who are typically considered cases of language loss or incomplete acquisition. Potential Spanish language loss was assessed with respect to the grammar of monolingual Spanish speakers and with respect to the bilinguals' own competence in English, their perceived stronger language. The…
Command of gender agreement in school-age Spanish-English Bilingual Children
By age three to four, monolingual Spanish-speaking children master gender marking and agreement in noun phrases. It is unclear whether bilingual children acquire gender marking rules by the same age as do monolingual children, and whether they in fact ever acquire these rules with 100% accuracy. This study tested sixty 6 to 11-year-old bilingual children attending a Spanish-English two-way immersion school in Chicago divided into two main age gro…
Incomplete Acquisition in Bilingualism: Re-examining the Age Factor
Age effects have played a particularly prominent role in some theoretical perspectives on second language acquisition. This book takes an entirely new perspective on this issue by re-examining these theories in light of the existence of apparently similar non-native outcomes in adult heritage speakers who, unlike adult second language learners, acquired two or more languages in childhood. Despite having been exposed to their family language early…
Gender Agreement in Adult Second Language Learners and Spanish Heritage Speakers: The Effects of Age and Context of Acquisition
This study investigates knowledge of gender agreement in Spanish L2 learners and heritage speakers, who differ in age and context/mode of acquisition. On some current theoretical accounts, persistent difficulty with grammatical gender in adult L2 acquisition is due to age. These accounts predict that heritage speakers should be more accurate on gender agreement than L2 learners, because their Spanish language acquisition started in infancy. Sixty…
Knowledge of tense-aspect and mood in Spanish heritage speakers
Child and adult Spanish heritage speakers have been shown to display erosion and loss of the tense-aspect and mood system in oral production. In particular, while they retain the preterit—imperfect difference in the past, the meanings and forms are often confused. Subjunctive morphology, on the other hand, is even more affected (Silva-Corvalán, 1994, 2003). Two related studies were conducted to examine the extent of incomplete knowledge of tense-…
On some null subject parameter-related properties in the L3 acquisition of brazilian portuguese (Sobre algumas propriedades relacionadas ao parâmetro do sujeito nulo na aquisição do português brasilei…
As language undergoing language change, Brazilian Portuguese presents characteristics of both pro-drop and non-pro drop systems. This study investigates the acquisition of two properties assumed to be related to the null subject parameter—clitic-climbing and the that-t effect—by adult learners of Brazilian Portuguese who speak a pro-drop language (Spanish) (n = 11) and a non pro-drop language (English) (n =19) as either L1 or L2. Results of an ac…
Putting parameters in their proper place
Seeing the logical problem of second language acquisition as that of primarily selecting and re-assembling bundles of features anew, Lardiere proposes to dispense with the deductive learning approach and its broad range of consequences subsumed under the concept of parameters. While we agree that feature assembly captures more precisely the complexity of the form—meaning mapping task in second language acquisition, we disagree with the dismissal …
Back to basics: Incomplete knowledge of Differential Object Marking in Spanish heritage speakers
The obligatory use of the preposition a with animate, specific direct objects in Spanish (Juan conoce a María "Juan knows Maria") is a well-known instance of Differential Object Marking (DOM; Torrego, 1998; Leonetti, 2004). Recent studies have documented the loss and/or incomplete acquisition of several grammatical features in Spanish heritage speakers (Silva-Corvalán, 1994; Montrul, 2002), including DOM (Montrul, 2004a). This study assesses the …
How similar are adult second language learners and Spanish heritage speakers? Spanish clitics and word order
Recent studies of heritage speakers, many of whom possess incomplete knowledge of their family language, suggest that these speakers may be linguistically superior to second language (L2) learners only in phonology but not in morphosyntax. This study reexamines this claim by focusing on knowledge of clitic pronouns and word order in 24 L2 learners and 24 Spanish heritage speakers. Results of an oral production task, a written grammaticality judgm…
Is Grammar Instruction Beneficial for Heritage Language Learners? Dative Case Marking in Spanish
Spanish heritage speakers have been shown to have incomplete knowledge of dative case marking with both animate direct objects (also known as differential object marking (DOM) or a-personal) and dative experiencers with gustar-psych verbs in oral and written modes (Montrul, 2004; Montrul & Bowles, in press). In general, Spanish objects that are animate and specific are obligatorily marked with the preposition a (Juan conoce a tu hermana “Juan kno…
Clitics and object expression in the L3 acquisition of Brazilian Portuguese: Structural similarity matters for transfer
This article addresses the role of previously acquired languages in the acquisition of a third language (L3) in two experimental studies on object expression in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). Participants were English-speaking learners of BP as L3 with knowledge of Spanish as a second language (L2) and Spanish-speaking learners of BP with knowledge of English as L2. Like Spanish, BP has object clitic pronouns, but there are important differences betw…
Linguistics (69 works) · Psychology (60 works) · Computer Science (37 works) · Philosophy (34 works) · Heritage language (31 works) · Language Development and Disorders (31 works) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (29 works) · Second-language acquisition (22 works) · First language (21 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (21 works)