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Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism: Online-First ArticlesFrequency effects and aspect morphology with state verbs in heritage Spanish
A total of 54 HS and 17 Spanish-dominant participants completed an elicited production task (EPT) and a forced choice task (FCT) to explore how proficiency, frequency of use, age of acquisition of English, morphological regularity, and lexical frequency affected their production and selection of preterit morphology with states. Results showed that HS’ production of preterit with states was negatively correlated with lexical frequency, such that these bilinguals were more likely to use the preterit with less-frequent verbs. Higher-proficiency speakers were less susceptible to the effects of lexical frequency in production. In contrast, proficiency modulated HS’ responses in the FCT. HS were more likely to select the preterit in the FCT than to produce it in the EPT. Together, these results support theories of heritage language acquisition that emphasize the role of activation of linguistic features and asymmetries between production and comprehension.
Keywords: aspect, lexical frequency, Spanish as a heritage language
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Introduction to aspect
- 2.1Grammatical aspect in Spanish
- 2.2Aspect in Spanish as a HL
- 3.Evaluating intraspeaker variability
- 3.1Lexical frequency
- 3.2Morphological regularity
- 3.3Task effects and asymmetrical performance
- 3.4The role of comparison groups
- 4.The present study
- 4.1Participants
- 4.2Biographical measures
- 4.3Experimental tasks
- 5.Results
- 5.1Inferential statistics
- 5.1.1Group-task-proficiency model
- 5.1.2Results for HS
- 5.2Summary of findings
- 5.1Inferential statistics
- 6.Discussion
- 7.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
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