Cover not available
Article published In:
Psycholinguistic approaches to production and comprehension in bilingual adults and children
Edited by Maialen Iraola Azpiroz, Shanley E.M. Allen, Kalliopi Katsika and Leigh B. Fernandez
[Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 9:4/5] 2019
► pp. 659–686

Child heritage speakers’ production and comprehension of direct object clitic gender in Spanish

 | University of New Mexico
 | University of New Mexico
 | University of New Mexico
 | University of New Mexico
This study investigates 37 child heritage speakers’ direct object (DO) clitics in Spanish. Results from a production task show that DO expression versus omission was related to Spanish vocabulary: the lower the vocabulary score, the more omitted DOs. In contrast, DO clitic gender was related to English: children who used more English in the home and who had higher English vocabulary scores produced more gender mismatches, most notably lo referring to feminine referents. Results from a comprehension task suggest that children do not attend to clitic gender for referent identification. We argue that the disambiguation function of DO clitic gender, which is infrequent in discourse, may take a long time to develop. Overall, the study suggests that the extent to which restricted input and crosslinguistic influence affect child heritage speakers’ minority language grammar may be mediated by the nature of the linguistic phenomenon in question.
Keywords: clitic gender, direct object clitics, child heritage speakers, heritage language acquisition, Spanish-English bilingualism
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Grammatical gender in Spanish
  • 3.Children’s acquisition of grammatical gender
    • 3.1Children’s production of grammatical gender
    • 3.2Children’s comprehension of grammatical gender
    • 3.3Summary of previous research on children’s acquisition of grammatical gender
  • 4.Research questions
  • 5.Methods
    • 5.1Child participants
    • 5.2Adult participants
    • 5.3Materials and procedures
  • 6.Results: Standardized vocabulary scores
  • 7.Results: DO clitic tasks
    • 7.1DO omission in lo/la production task
    • 7.2DO clitic gender in lo/la production task
    • 7.3Results: Lo-la comprehension
    • 7.4Summary of results
  • 8.Discussion
    • 8.1The impact of restricted input and contact-induced change on DO clitic production
    • 8.2Comprehension of DO clitic gender
  • 9.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 9 October 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.17029.shi
References (50)
References
Anderson, R. (1999). Loss of gender agreement in L1 attrition. Bilingual Research Journal, 23(4), 389–408. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bedore, L. M., & Leonard, L. B. (2001). Grammatical morphology deficits in Spanish-speaking children with specific language impairment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 44(4), 905–924. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bedore, L. M., Peña, E. D., Griffin, Z. M., & Hixon, G. (2016). Effects of age of English exposure, current input/output, and grade on bilingual language performance. Journal of Child Language, 431, 687–706. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bedore, L. M., Peña, E. D., Summers, C. L., Boerger, K. M., Resendiz, M. D., Green, K., Bohman, T., & Gillam, R. (2012). The measure matters: Language dominance profiles across measures in Spanish – English bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 15(3), 616–29. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Castilla, A. P., & Pérez-Leroux, A. T. (2010). Omissions and substitutions in Spanish object clitics: Developmental optionality as a property of the representational system. Language Acquisition, 17(1–2), 2–25. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Castilla-Earls, A. P., Restrepo, M. A., Pérez-Leroux, A. T., Gray, S., Holmes, P., Gail, D., & Chen, Z. (2016). Interactions between bilingual effects and language impairment: Exploring grammatical markers in Spanish-speaking bilingual children. Applied Psycholinguistics, 37(5), 1147–73. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Croft, W. (2001). Radical construction grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cuza, A. (2016). The status of interrogative subject-verb inversion in Spanish-English bilingual children. Lingua, 1801, 124–138. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cuza, A., & Pérez-Tattam, R. (2016). Grammatical gender selection and phrasal word order in child heritage Spanish: A feature re-assembly approach. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 19(1), 50–68. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Davies, M. (2006). A frequency dictionary of Spanish: Core vocabulary for learners. New York: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De la Mora, J. (2004). Direct object clitics in Spanish-speaking children with and without specific language impairment. MA Thesis, Autonomous University of Queretaro, Queretaro, Mexico.Google Scholar
Dell, G. S., & Chang, F. (2014). The P-chain: Relating sentence production and its disorders to comprehension and acquisition. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 369(1634), 20120394. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Domínguez, L. (2003). Interpreting reference in the early acquisition of Spanish clitics. In S. Montrul and F. Ordóñez, Francisco (Eds.), Linguistic theory and language development in Hispanic languages: Papers from the 5th Hispanic linguistics symposium and the 4th conference on the acquisition of Spanish and Portuguese, (pp. 212–228). Somerville, USA, Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Dunn, M., & Dunn, L. M. (2007). Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test – 4. Circle Pines, MN: American Guidance Service.Google Scholar
Dunn, L. M., Lugo, D. E., Padilla, E. R., & Dunn, L. M. (1986). Test de Vocabulario en Imágenes Peabody. Circle Pines, MN: American Guidance Service.Google Scholar
Franck, J., Vigliocco, G., Antón-Méndez, I., Collina, S., & Frauenfelder, U. H. (2008). The interplay of syntax and form in sentence production: A cross-linguistic study of form effects on agreement. Language and Cognitive Processes, 23(3), 329–374. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gathercole, V. (2002). Grammatical gender in bilingual and monolingual children: A Spanish morphosyntactic distinction. In D. K. Oller & R. E. Eilers (Eds.), Language and Literacy in Bilingual Children (pp. 207–19). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gathercole, V., & Thomas, D. (2009). Bilingual first-language development: Dominant language takeover, threatened minority language take-up. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 121, 213–237. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gómez-Sebaine, S. (2013). La omisión y duplicación de objetos en el castellano del País Vasco. In B. Camus-Bergareche & S. Gomez-Seibane (Eds.), El Castellano del País Vasco (pp. 193–214). Bilbao: Universidad del País Vasco.Google Scholar
Grüter, T. (2005). Comprehension and production of French object clitics by child second language learners and children with specific language impairment. Applied Psycholinguistics, 261, 363–391. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Grüter, T., Hurtado, N., & Fernald, A. (2012). Interpreting object clitics in real time: Eye-tracking evidence from 4-year-old and adult speakers of Spanish. In A. K. Biller, E. Y. Chung & A. E. Kimball (Eds.), Proceedings of the 36th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 213–225). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Hernández Pina, F. (1984). Teorías psicosociolingüísticas y su aplicación a la adquisición del español como lengua materna. Madrid: Siglo XXI de España.Google Scholar
Klee, C., & Lynch, A. (2009). El español en contacto con otras lenguas. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Kroll, J., Dussias, P., Bice, K., & Perrotti, L. (2015). Bilingualism, mind, and brain. Annual Review of Linguistics, 11, 377–94. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Larrañaga, P., & Guijarro-Fuentes, P. (2012). Clitics in L1 bilingual acquisition. First Language, 321, 151–175. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lew-Williams, C., & Fernald, A. (2007). Young children learning Spanish make rapid use of grammatical gender in spoken word recognition. Psychological Science, 181, 193–98. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
MacDonald, M. C. (2013). How language production shapes language form and comprehension. Frontiers in Psychology, 41. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mariscal, S. (2008). Early acquisition of gender agreement in the Spanish noun phrase: Starting small. Journal of Child Language, 361, 1–28.Google Scholar
Merino, B. (1983). Language loss in bilingual Chicano children. Journal of Applied Development Psychology, 101, 477–494.Google Scholar
Montrul, S., Davidson, J., De La Fuente, I., & Foote, R. (2014). Early language experience facilitates the processing of gender agreement in Spanish heritage speakers. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 171, 118–38. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Montrul, S., & Potowski, K. (2007). Command of gender agreement in school-age Spanish-English bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingualism, 111, 301–28. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Montrul, S., & Sánchez-Walker, N. (2013). Differential object marking in child and adult Spanish heritage speakers. Language Acquisition, 201, 109–32. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Paredes, L. (1996). The Spanish continuum in Peruvian bilingual speakers: A study of verbal clitics. Los Angeles: University of Southern California dissertation.Google Scholar
Peña, E. D., Gutiérrez-Clellen, V. F., Iglesias, A., Goldstein, B. A., & Bedore, L. M. (2014). Bilingual English Spanish Assessment (BESA). San Rafael, CA: AR Clinical Publications.Google Scholar
Pérez Pereira, M. (1991). The acquisition of gender: What Spanish children tell us. Journal of Child Language, 181, 571–590. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pérez-Leroux, A. T., Castilla-Earls, A., & Brunner, J. (2012). General and specific effects of lexicon in grammar: Determiner and object pronoun omissions in child Spanish. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 551, 313–327. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pérez-Leroux, A. T., Pirvulescu, M., & Roberge, Y. (2018). Direct objects and language acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pirvulescu, M., Pérez-Leroux, A.-T., Roberge, Y., Strik, N., & Thomas, D. (2014). Bilingual effects: Exploring object omission in pronominal languages. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 171, 495–510. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Putnam, M. T., & Sánchez, L. (2013). What’s so incomplete about incomplete acquisition?: A prolegomenon to modeling heritage language grammars. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 31, 478–508. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rodina, Y., & Westergaard, M. (2015). Grammatical gender in Norwegian-Russian acquisition: The role of input and transparency. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 201, 197–214. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sainzmaza-Lecanda, L., & Schwenter, S. (2017). Null objects with and without bilingualism in the Portuguese and Spanish-speaking world. In K. Bellamy, M. Child, P. González, A. Muntendam, & M. C. Parafita Couto (Eds.), Multidisciplinary approaches to bilingualism in the Hispanic and Lusophone world (pp. 95–119). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schwartz, M., Minkov, M., Dieser, E., Protassova, E., Moin, V., & Polinsky, M. (2015). Acquisition of Russian gender agreement by monolingual and bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingualism, 191, 726–752. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schwenter, S. (2006). Null objects across South America. In T. Face & C. Klee (Eds.), Selected Proceedings of the 8th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium (pp. 23–36). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Projects.Google Scholar
Silva-Corvalán, C. (2014). Bilingual language acquisition: Spanish and English in the first six years. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Teschner, R., & Russell, W. (1984). The gender patterns of Spanish nouns: An inverse dictionary-based analysis. Hispanic Linguistics, 11, 115–132.Google Scholar
Urbaniak, G. C., & Plous, S. (2013). Research Randomizer (Version 4.0) [Computer software]. Retrieved on June 22, 2015 from [URL]
Valdés, G. (2005). Bilingualism, heritage language learners, and SLA research: Opportunities lost or seized? The Modern Language Journal, 89 (3), 410–26. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Varlokosta, S., Belletti, A., Costa, J., Friedmann, N., Gavarró, A., & Grohmann, K.K. (2016). A cross-linguistic study of the acquisition of clitic and pronoun production. Language Acquisition, 23(1), 1–26. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wonnacott, E. (2017). Learning syntactic categories (gender classes): A language learning study with 7-year-olds. Paper presented at the 14th International Congress for the Study of Child Language (IASCL 2017). July 17–21, 2017. Lyon, France.
Cited by (20)

Cited by 20 other publications

Austin, Jennifer, Patrick D. Thane, Stephanie A. Rodríguez & Michele Goldin
2024. The comprehension of clitic gender in child heritage and second language Spanish: evidence from a dual language program. Frontiers in Language Sciences 3 DOI logo
Basterretxea Santiso, Gorka
2024. ‘Aquí toman mucho sopa’: Linguistic variables as predictors of non-standard gender agreement production in Basque Spanish. Open Linguistics 10:1 DOI logo
Fuchs, Zuzanna, Maria Polinsky & Gregory Scontras
2024. Explaining gender. In Multifaceted Multilingualism [Studies in Bilingualism, 66], ► pp. 292 ff. DOI logo
Jimenez, Abril, Julio César López Otero & Isabella DePue
2024. L2 Spanish clitics among Brazilian Portuguese-speaking learners: the predictive role of lexical knowledge. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 9:1 DOI logo
Martinez-Nieto, Lourdes & Maria Adelaida Restrepo
2024. Production and comprehension of grammatical gender by Spanish heritage speakers: Evidence from accusative clitic pronouns. International Journal of Bilingualism 28:6 ► pp. 1163 ff. DOI logo
Cuza, Alejandro & Laura Solano-Escobar
2023. Protracted development in child heritage Spanish: Evidence from inalienable possession. Second Language Research DOI logo
Daskalaki, Evangelia, Adriana Soto-Corominas, Aisha Barisé, Johanne Paradis, Xi Chen & Alexandra Gottardo
2023. The interplay between syntactic and morphological comprehension in heritage contexts: The case of relative clauses in heritage Syrian Arabic. Applied Psycholinguistics 44:6 ► pp. 1043 ff. DOI logo
Dracos, Melisa & Pablo E. Requena
2023. Child heritage speakers’ acquisition of the Spanish subjunctive in volitional and adverbial clauses. Language Acquisition 30:1 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
López Otero, Julio César, Alejandro Cuza & Jian Jiao
2023. Object clitic use and intuition in the Spanish of heritage speakers from Brazil. Second Language Research 39:1 ► pp. 161 ff. DOI logo
Shin, Naomi, Alejandro Cuza & Liliana Sánchez
2023. Structured variation, language experience, and crosslinguistic influence shape child heritage speakers’ Spanish direct objects. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 26:2 ► pp. 317 ff. DOI logo
Shin, Naomi L.
2023. Está abriendo, la abrió: Lexical knowledge, verb type, and grammatical aspect shape child heritage speakers’ direct object omission in Spanish. International Journal of Bilingualism 27:5 ► pp. 842 ff. DOI logo
Lease, Sarah
2022. Spanish in Albuquerque, New Mexico: Spanish-English Bilingual Adults’ and Children’s Vocalic Realizations. Languages 7:1 ► pp. 53 ff. DOI logo
Shin, Naomi
2022. Structured variation in child heritage speakers' grammars. Language and Linguistics Compass 16:12 DOI logo
Shin, Naomi
2024. Monolingual and bilingual child language acquisition and language change. In Lifespan Acquisition and Language Change [Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics, 14], ► pp. 44 ff. DOI logo
Azpiroz, Maialen Iraola, Shanley E.M. Allen, Kalliopi Katsika & Leigh Fernandez
2021. Psycholinguistic approaches to production and comprehension in bilingual adults and children. In Psycholinguistic Approaches to Production and Comprehension in Bilingual Adults and Children [Benjamins Current Topics, 117], ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Requena, Pablo E & Melisa Dracos
2021. Spanish copula selection with adjectives in school-aged bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingualism 25:3 ► pp. 548 ff. DOI logo
Viner, Kevin Martillo
2021. Generational differences in the placement of clitic se in New York City Spanish. International Journal of Bilingualism 25:5 ► pp. 1460 ff. DOI logo
Goebel-Mahrle, Thomas & Naomi L. Shin
2020. A corpus study of child heritage speakers’ Spanish gender agreement. International Journal of Bilingualism 24:5-6 ► pp. 1088 ff. DOI logo
Azpiroz, Maialen Iraola, Shanley E. M. Allen, Kalliopi Katsika & Leigh Fernandez
2019. Psycholinguistic approaches to production and comprehension in bilingual adults and children. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 9:4-5 ► pp. 505 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2022. Bilingualism, Language Development and Processing across the Lifespan [Bilingual Processing and Acquisition, 15], DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 18 december 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.