Resumen de Language activation in dual language schools: the development of subject-verb agreement in the English and Spanish of heritage speaker children
Cross-linguistically, monolingual children produce target-like inflected verbs much earlier than they can reliably distinguish between singular and plural subject-verb agreement morphology in comprehension (i.e. Johnson, V., J. de Villiers, and H. Seymour. 2005. “Agreement Without Understanding? The Case of Third Person Singular /s/.” First Language 25: 317-333; Pérez-Leroux, A. T. 2005. “Number Problems in Children.” In Proceedings of the 2005 Annual Conference of the Canadian Linguistics Association, edited by C. Gurski, 1-12. https://cla-acl.artsci.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/actes-2005/Perez-Leroux.pdf). In heritage speakers, Spanish agreement morphology shows optionality due to reduced input, especially when children transition to English schooling (i.e. Montrul, S. 2004. The Acquisition of Spanish: Morphosyntactic Development in Monolingual and Bilingual L1 Acquisition and Adult L2 Acquisition. Amsterdam: John Benjamins; Jacobson, P. 2012. “The Effects of Language Impairment on the use of Direct Object Pronouns and Verb Inflections in Heritage Spanish Speakers: A Look at Attrition, Incomplete Acquisition and Maintenance.” Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 15 (1): 22–38). We investigate how simultaneous heritage bilingual children’s interpretation and use of subject-verb agreement in English and Spanish may be modulated by increased input and activation of Spanish in dual language education (DLE). 125 participants aged 3–7 (42 heritage children, 40 English monolinguals, 39 Spanish-dominant children) took part in a fill-in-the-blanks task and a picture-matching task. In English, bilingual comprehension accuracy surpassed that of the monolinguals. In Spanish, bilingual production lagged behind that of the Spanish-dominant children and language output was found to be a greater predictor of productive accuracy than increased activation of Spanish in DLE. The implications of these results for theories of bilingualism and DLE are discussed.
