Chapter 4
The acquisition of grammatical gender in child and adult heritage speakers of Spanish
Beyond the source of differences
Previous work on the acquisition of grammatical gender in child and adult heritage speakers of
Spanish has found significant mismatches in gender agreement stemming from overgeneralization of the masculine form to
contexts in which the feminine is required. It has been argued that these divergences stem from various sources
including incomplete acquisition during childhood (e.g. Montrul & Potowski,
2007; Montrul, Foote, & Perpiñan, 2008), form/meaning
mapping issues (e.g. Alarcón, 2011) or reconfiguration of gender features
(e.g. Cuza & Pérez-Tattam, 2016; Scontras, Polinsky, & Fuchs, 2018). The goal of the present chapter is to examine this previous work
on grammatical gender and the extent to which it can shed light on more recent proposals on heritage language
theorizing. We follow the Bilingual Alignment Approach (Sánchez, 2019) to
argue that the divergences heritage speakers show can be better accounted for in relation to crosslinguistic influence
at the level of bilingual alignments, linguistic proficiency and specific patterns of language exposure and usage.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Gender expression in Spanish and English
- 3.The nature of differences in heritage language bilingualism
- 4.Previous research in the acquisition of grammatical gender
- 5.Beyond the source of differences: The bilingual alignment approach
- 6.Conclusion
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Notes
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References