Article published In:
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism: Online-First ArticlesSchool, age, and exposure effects in the child heritage language acquisition of the Spanish volitional subjunctive
The present study investigated the production and receptive knowledge of the Spanish subjunctive mood in
volitional clauses by 57 English-dominant heritage speakers in fifth, seventh, and eighth grades (ages 10–14), some of whom were
enrolled in a dual-language immersion program. Children’s self-reported frequency of use of Spanish affected command of this
structure, and participants showed more consistent selection of the subjunctive than production of this form. There were no
differences in production or selection between children in the dual-language immersion and monolingual English schools, but older
children produced and selected the subjunctive more than younger participants. The lexical frequency of individual subordinate
verbs did not affect subjunctive use. The role for frequency of use and asymmetrical performance between tasks support Putnam and Sánchez’s (2013) activation approach to heritage language acquisition.
However, the absence of an effect for bilingual schooling or lexical frequency and the increased use of subjunctive mood with age
do not strictly align with theories of a reassembly of features in heritage language acquisition, and argue for a protracted
development of subjunctive mood in heritage Spanish.
Keywords: heritage language acquisition, child bilingualism, protracted development, Spanish as a heritage language, dual language immersion
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Exposure, heritage language development, and dual language immersion
- 3.Spanish subjunctive mood: Theory and acquisition
- 3.1Monolingual acquisition
- 3.2Heritage language acquisition of subjunctive
- 4.The study
- 4.1Participants
- 4.2Method and tasks
- 4.2.1Language background tasks
- 4.2.2Linguistic tasks
- 5.Results
- 5.1Analysis
- 5.2Descriptive analysis
- 5.3Individual analyses
- 5.4Inferential statistics
- 6.Discussion
- 7.Conclusion
- Data availability statement
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
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