Chapter 3
A corpus analysis of the structural elaboration of Spanish
heritage language learners
Research on heritage language learner (HLL)
grammar provides insights into bilingual developmental trajectories
(Bolger & Zapata,
2011). More research is needed on the effects of
cognitive processes on HLL grammar under real-time communicative
pressures (Jegerski,
2017). The present corpus-based study analyzes the role of
cognitive factors on HLLs’ (N = 65) production of
structural elaboration (i.e., syntactic modifiers and embedding),
which is cognitively challenging to monolinguals (Ferreira, 1991). The
analysis of the participants’ production in an instant-messaging
task indicates that, even though advanced HLLs may be fairly
homogeneous in their general grammatical and lexical abilities, they
vary significantly in the production of structural elaboration in
syntactic frames (e.g., verb phrases with clitics, relative clauses)
that interact strongly with working memory and attentional
resources.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Literature review
- 2.1Core and peripheral grammatical knowledge of advanced
heritage language learners
- 2.2On the need to expand our understanding of the cognition of
HLL performance
- 2.3Expanding the pool of HLL data
- 3.Research questions
- 3.1Method
- 3.1.1Participants
- 3.1.2Task and corpora
- 3.2General assessment of HLLs’ proficiency
- 3.3Tagging and parsing
- 3.4Analysis
- 4.Results
- 5.Discussion and conclusions
-
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