This paper presents an eye-tracking study using the Visual World Paradigm that tests whether participants are able to access gender information on definite articles and deploy it to facilitate lexical retrieval of subsequent nouns. A comparison of heritage speakers of Spanish with control monolingual speakers of Spanish suggests that the heritage speakers’ performance on this task is qualitatively similar to that of the baseline. This suggests that, despite non-target-like performance in offline tasks targeting gender production and comprehension, heritage speakers of Spanish can use gender in a target-like manner in online tasks. In line with proposals put forth by Grüter et al. (2012) and Montrul et al. (2014), a preliminary comparison with previous work on L2 learners (Lew-Williams & Fernald, 2010; Grüter et al., 2012; Dussias et al., 2013) provides tentative support for the idea that the nature of early language learning is crucial in developing the ability to use grammatical gender to facilitate lexical retrieval (Grüter et al., 2012; Montrul et al., 2014).
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2024. German-dominant Vietnamese heritage speakers use semantic constraints of German for anticipation during comprehension in Vietnamese. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 27:1 ► pp. 57 ff.
2024. Morphosyntactic predictive processing in adult heritage speakers: effects of cue availability and spoken and written language experience. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 39:1 ► pp. 118 ff.
Montrul, Silvina, Sara Ann Mason & Andrew Armstrong
2024. The Role of Language Experience in the Acquisition of Spanish Gender Agreement: A Study with Nonce Nouns. Languages 9:2 ► pp. 45 ff.
Parshina, Olga, Nina Ladinskaya, Lidia Gault & Irina A. Sekerina
2024. Predictive Language Processing in Russian Heritage Speakers: Task Effects on Morphosyntactic Prediction in Reading. Languages 9:5 ► pp. 158 ff.
Prystauka, Yanina, Jiuzhou Hao, Reinaldo Cabrera Perez & Jason Rothman
2024. Lexical interference and prediction in sentence processing among Russian heritage speakers: an individual differences approach. Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science
Jegerski, Jill & Gregory D. Keating
2023. Using self-paced reading in research with heritage speakers: a role for reading skill in the online processing of Spanish verb argument specifications. Frontiers in Psychology 14
Luque, Alicia, Eleonora Rossi, Maki Kubota, Megan Nakamura, César Rosales, Cristina López-Rojas, Yulia Rodina & Jason Rothman
2023. Morphological transparency and markedness matter in heritage speaker gender processing: an EEG study. Frontiers in Psychology 14
Sagarra, Nuria & Joseph V. Casillas
2023. Practice beats age: co-activation shapes heritage speakers’ lexical access more than age of onset. Frontiers in Psychology 14
Fuchs, Zuzanna
2022. Eyetracking evidence for heritage speakers’ access to abstract syntactic agreement features in real-time processing. Frontiers in Psychology 13
Fuchs, Zuzanna
2024. Processing of grammatical gender agreement morphemes in Polish: evidence from the Visual World Paradigm. Morphology 34:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
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.
Keating, Gregory D.
2024. Morphological Markedness and the Temporal Dynamics of Gender Agreement Processing in Spanish as a Majority and a Heritage Language. Language Learning
Parshina, Olga, Anastasiya Lopukhina & Irina A. Sekerina
2022. Can Heritage Speakers Predict Lexical and Morphosyntactic Information in Reading?. Languages 7:1 ► pp. 60 ff.
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