Understanding variability in heritage speakers' processing of the Spanish subjunctive

Within the field of heritage language research, the vast majority of studies have concluded that heritage speakers’ knowledge of the Spanish subjunctive is subject to incomplete acquisition. However, this conclusion is oftentimes the result of a misinterpretation of the variability inherent to heritage grammars.

 

The present study challenges these deficit-oriented perspectives by employing a usage-based approach to integrate sociolinguistic data into the design of a psycholinguistic experiment that examines processing of the Spanish subjunctive during online comprehension in heritage speakers’ belonging to a long-standing bilingual community in Albuquerque (NM). In addition, other lexical factors (i.e., morphological regularity and lexical frequency) that might modulate speakers’ sensitivity to the factors that condition mood selection were also explored to better characterize the linguistic profile of participants.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Twenty-five heritage speakers of Spanish participated in the experiment. Participants heard a preceding context (Table 1) followed by a target sentence in two conditions: in Condition 1 (C1), the subordinate verb was presented in the subjunctive form (licensed condition); in Condition 2 (C2), the subordinate verb was presented in the indicative form (unlicensed condition). In both conditions, the main verb subcategorized for a verb with subjunctive morphology.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We predicted that:

1. If participants were immediately sensitive to the lexical constraints encoded in the main verb, C1 should be easier to process than C2. 

2. Linguistic and sociolinguistic factors would play a crucial role in modulating participants’ sensitivity to the constraints on mood selection.

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Our results support predictions 1 (Figure 1) and 2 (Figures 3-5). The findings reported highlight that factors such as the community examined, the ecological validity of the materials used and the diversity of explanatory variables included in analyses are crucial  and can contribute significantly to a more unified theory of heritage language acquisition and processing with much greater explanatory adequacy.

 

In addition to this, an elicited production experiment was designed to examine participants’ accuracy in the production of subjunctive with (1) non-variable and (2) negated governors. As shown in Figure 3 below, participants were highly accurate across the board (there were no significant differences between groups), and produced subjunctive forms more accurately with non-variable governors overall.

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