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Article published In:
Linguistics in the Netherlands 2014
Edited by Anita Auer and Björn Köhnlein
[Linguistics in the Netherlands 31] 2014
► pp. 93–106

Gender agreement in interface contexts in the oral production of heritage speakers of Spanish in the Netherlands

| University of Amsterdam
| Radboud University Nijmegen

In this paper we present an analysis of Spanish heritage speakers’ oral production of gender agreement outside the DP as an innovative source of support for the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace & Filiaci 2006). We demonstrate that, besides commonly known factors such as the gender, animacy and morphology of the antecedent, the interface domain in which gender agreement takes place also seems to play a role in how accurately heritage speakers apply gender agreement. Pronominal reference, located at the external syntax-discourse interface, turns out to be more problematic than adjectival predication, which pertains to the internal morpho-syntax interface. Furthermore, we discuss the possibility that, besides the amount of input heritage speakers receive, the quality of this input may also play a role in their gender agreement accuracy, given that the heritage speakers’ error pattern with respect to linguistic factors is very similar to that of first generation immigrants.

Keywords: Spanish, Heritage speakers, Interface Hypothesis, gender agreement
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 10 November 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.31.08osc
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Cited by 6 other publications

Boers, Ivo, Bo Sterken, Brechje van Osch, M. Carmen Parafita Couto, Janet Grijzenhout & Deniz Tat
2020. Gender in Unilingual and Mixed Speech of Spanish Heritage Speakers in The Netherlands. Languages 5:4 ► pp. 68 ff. DOI logo
Denbaum, Nofiya & Ana de Prada Pérez
2021. How do Spanish heritage speakers in the US assign gender to English nouns in Spanish-English code-switching?. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 11:6 ► pp. 846 ff. DOI logo
Di Pisa, Grazia, Maki Kubota, Jason Rothman & Theodoros Marinis
2022. Effects of markedness in gender processing in Italian as a heritage language: A speed accuracy tradeoff. Frontiers in Psychology 13 DOI logo
Hur, Esther, Julio Cesar Lopez Otero & Liliana Sanchez
2020. Gender Agreement and Assignment in Spanish Heritage Speakers: Does Frequency Matter?. Languages 5:4 ► pp. 48 ff. DOI logo
Keating, Gregory D.
2022. The Effect of Age of Onset of Bilingualism on Gender Agreement Processing in Spanish as a Heritage Language. Language Learning 72:4 ► pp. 1170 ff. DOI logo
Montrul, Silvina
2023. Heritage Languages: Language Acquired, Language Lost, Language Regained. Annual Review of Linguistics 9:1 ► pp. 399 ff. DOI logo

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