Child Heritage Speakers' Acquisition of the Spanish Subjunctive in Volitional and Adverbial Clauses

Autor/inn/en	Dracos, Melisa; Requena, Pablo E.
Titel	Child Heritage Speakers' Acquisition of the Spanish Subjunctive in Volitional and Adverbial Clauses
Quelle	In: Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 30 (2023) 1, S.1-28 (28 Seiten)Infoseite zur Zeitschrift PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Zusatzinformation	ORCID (Dracos, Melisa) ORCID (Requena, Pablo E.)
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	1048-9223
DOI	10.1080/10489223.2022.2071156
Schlagwörter	Spanish; Verbs; Form Classes (Languages); Monolingualism; Language Acquisition; Native Speakers; Heritage Education; Oral Language; Task Analysis; Language Variation; Age Differences; Morphology (Languages); Language Proficiency; Linguistic Input; Family Relationship; Syntax; Grammar; Correlation; Phrase Structure; English (Second Language); Hispanic Americans; Second Language Learning; Mexican Americans; Language Tests; Likert Scales; Children; Adolescents + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Spanisch; Analytischer Sprachbau; Sprachaneignung; Spracherwerb; Muttersprachler; Oral interpretation; Mündlicher Sprachgebrauch; Aufgabenanalyse; Sprachenvielfalt; Age; Difference; Age difference; Altersunterschied; Morphology; Morphologie; Language skill; Language skills; Sprachkompetenz; Sprachbildung; Grammatik; Korrelation; Phrasenstruktur; English as second language; English; Second Language; Englisch als Zweitsprache; Hispanic; Hispanoamerikaner; Zweitsprachenerwerb; Language test; Sprachtest; Likert-Skala; Child; Kind; Kinder; Adolescent; Adolescence; Adoleszenz; Jugend; Jugendalter; Jugendlicher
Abstract	The Spanish subjunctive mood (SUBJ) is said to be highly vulnerable in heritage language (HL) acquisition. However, there is little controlled research on HL-speaking children acquiring the various Spanish SUBJ contexts, so we do not have a clear picture of when, how, or why heritage speakers (HSs) develop in the SUBJ as they do. This study tests the development of the SUBJ in two of the earliest acquired contexts by monolingual children--SUBJ with volitional clauses and adverbial clauses with future reference. Through an oral sentence-completion task administered to 50 school-aged child HSs, this study observes whether language-internal factors (modality, variability) and speaker factors (age, exposure/use, or morphosyntactic proficiency) influence acquisition of the SUBJ in the examined contexts. Although SUBJ is categorically used in the first-generation input the child HSs receive at home, school-aged HSs exhibit elevated optionality; the majority show a pattern of use typical of very young monolingual children, and there is wide variance among the child HSs across all ages. Overall, they exhibit slightly more optionality within epistemic modality (adverbials) than deontic modality (volition). Crucially, exposure to and use of Spanish and, even more so, a standardized measure of Spanish morphosyntactic proficiency were strongly associated with SUBJ use in both contexts by the child HSs. We argue that the observed vulnerability in these early-acquired SUBJ contexts follows from an interaction between the child HSs' engagement with the HL environment (including their resulting command of the HL grammar) and linguistic factors common to all SUBJ contexts. (As Provided).
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Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2024/1/01