Cover not available
Part of
Hispanic Contact Linguistics: Theoretical, methodological and empirical perspectives
Edited by Luis A. Ortiz López, Rosa E. Guzzardo Tamargo and Melvin González-Rivera
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 22] 2020
► pp. 61–82

Chapter 3
Methodological considerations in heritage language studies

A comparison of sociolinguistic and acquisition-based tasks

| Morton College

This study examines accuracy of heritage speakers with respect to gender agreement of noun phrase (NP) constituents. How does methodology affect participants’ accuracy with gender agreement (GA)? Methods employed include an acquisition-based task, and the sociolinguistic interview used in four groups: children who access heritage language (HL) in school and in social network (SN); children who access HL only in SN; children who access Spanish only at school; and finally, children who access Spanish neither in school nor in SN. Three groups showed comparable accuracy in sociolinguistic interviews and acquisition task. For the group that did not access Spanish at school/home, the accuracy was higher on a sociolinguistic task (98.61%) compared to acquisition task (73%). Different methodologies yielded different rates of accuracy. Methods influence the participants’ task accuracy.

Keywords: heritage language, language contact, child bilingualism, methodology, gender agreement
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Review of literature
  • 3.Grammatical gender
  • 4.Methodology
  • 5.Participants
  • 6.Context
  • 7.Findings
    • 7.1Oral narrative/story retelling
    • 7.2Statistical analysis of gender assignment tokens (story retelling)
    • 7.3Sociolinguistic task (group conversation)
    • 7.4Statistical analysis of sociolinguistic task
  • 8.Discussion
  • 9.Conclusion
  • Note
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 14 February 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.22.03mcm
References
Alarcón, I. V.
(2010) Gender assignment and agreement in L2 Spanish: The effects of morphological marking, animacy, and gender. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 3(2), 267–300. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2011) Spanish gender agreement under complete and incomplete acquisition: Early and late bilinguals’ linguistic behavior within the noun phrase. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 14(3), 332–350. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Anderson, R. W.
(1999) Loss of gender agreement in L1 attrition. Bilingual Research Journal, 23, 319–338.. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Beebe, Leslie
(1987) Sociolinguistic variation and style shifting in second language acquisition. In G. Ioup & S. Weinberger (Eds.), Interlanguage phonology: The acquisition of a second language sound system (pp. 378–388). Rowley, MA: Newbury House.Google Scholar
Cameron, R.
(2010) Growing up and apart: Gender divergences in a Chicagoland elementary school. Language Variation and Change, 22(2), 279–319. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Corbett, G. G.
(1991) Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dewaele, J. M., & Véronique, D.
(2001) Gender assignment and gender agreement in advanced French interlanguage: A cross-sectional study. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 4(3), 275–297. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Farr, M.
(2006) Rancheros in Chicagoacán: Language and identity in a transnational community. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Franceschina, F.
(2005) Fossilized second language grammars: The acquisition of grammatical gender. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2001) Morphological or syntactic deficits in near-native speakers? An assessment of some current proposals. Second Language Research, 17(3), 213–247. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Geeslin, K.
(2010) Beyond “naturalistic”: On the role of task characteristics and the importance of multiple elicitation methods. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 3(2), 501–520. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hawkins, R., & Franceschina, F.
(2004) Explaining the acquisition and non-acquisition of determiner-noun gender concord in French and Spanish. In P. Prévost & J. Paradis (Eds.), The acquisition of French in different contexts. Focus on functional categories (pp. 175–206). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Labov, W.
(1969) The study of non-standard English. Champaign, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.Google Scholar
Marshall, J., & Donnelly, D.
(1987) Red riding hood. London: Dial Books.Google Scholar
McManmon, Z. C.
(2016) Grammatical gender in child bilinguals: Language acquisition across sociolinguistic and pedagogical spheres (Unpublished doctoral dissertation).Google Scholar
Montrul, S.
(2009) Knowledge of tense-aspect and mood in Spanish heritage speakers. International Journal of Bilingualism, 13(2), 239–269. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Montrul, S., & Bowles, M.
(2009) Back to basics: Incomplete knowledge of Differential Object Marking in Spanish heritage speakers. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 12(3), 363–383. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Montrul, S.
(2008) Incomplete acquisition in bilingualism: Re-examining the age factor. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Montrul, S., Foote, R., & Perpiñán, S.
(2008) Gender agreement in adult second language learners and Spanish heritage speakers: The effects of age and context of acquisition. Language Learning, 58(3), 503–553. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Montrul, S., & Potowski, K.
(2007) Command of gender agreement in school-age Spanish-English bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingualism, 11(3), 301–328. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Montrul, S., & Sánchez-Walker, N.
(2013) Differential Object Marking in child and adult Spanish heritage speakers. Language Acquisition, 20(2), 109–132. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Otheguy, R.
(2013) The linguistic competence of second-generation bilinguals: A critique of “incomplete acquisition”. In C. Tortora, M. den Dikken, I. L. Montoya, & T. O’Neill (eds.), Romance linguistics 2013: Selected papers from the 43rd Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL) (pp. 301–320). Amsterdam: John Bejamins.Google Scholar
Shin, N. L., & Van Buren, J.
(2016) Maintenance of Spanish subject pronoun expression patterns among bilingual children of farmworkers in Washington/Montana. Spanish in Context, 13(2), 173–194. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wei, L.
(2000) Methodological questions in the study of bilingualism. In L. Wei (Ed.), The bilingualism reader (pp. 475–486). London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wolfson, N.
(1976) Speech events and natural speech: Some implications for sociolinguistic methodology. Language in Society, 5(2), 189–209. DOI logoGoogle Scholar