On the Status of Tense and AspectMorphology in Child Heritage Spanish: An Analysis of Accuracy Levels

Hispanics are the fastest growing minority group in the United States and are creating, in many parts of the country, large bilingual communities, especially among second-generation immigrants (Shin & Kominski, 2010). Those individuals who grew up in the United States but were raised speaking a minority language, specifically Spanish, at home are known as heritage speakers of Spanish (Valdes, 2001). Often these speakers acquire receptive or passive knowledge of the minority language with limited productive ability. They also have few opportunities to develop literacy or to be exposed to formal education in the minority language. Despite the increasing presence of Spanish heritage speakers in the United States, the development of their two languages is not completely understood. For instance, within the field of generative linguistics, three processes are argued to influence heritage language acquisition with no clear consensus on which process may affect which structures. Some authors argue for incomplete acquisition of the minority language, which is an “outcome of language acquisition that is not complete or attrition in childhood. Incomplete L1 acquisition occurs when, for different reasons, some specific properties of the language do not have a chance to develop to age-appropriate levels of proficiency after intense exposure to the L2 begins. ” (Montrul, 2002). However, others argue for L1 attrition, which is the complete and stable acquisition of a structure and its subsequent loss due to language reanalysis throughout the lifespan (Cuza, Perez-Tattam, Barajas, Miller & Sadowski, 2013; Polinsky, 2011). When studying adults’ minority language use, differential outcomes could be due to either process. For this reason, determining which structures are never completely acquired and which structures are acquired but later lost is difficult without longitudinal or cross-sectional studies with children throughout the first stages of acquisition and exposure to English-language schooling. Apart from these two processes leading to competence divergence in the minority language, other researchers argue that, in fact, these children have a completely formed grammar, but that their grammar is different from monolingual speakers because they have acquired a contact variety of Spanish which is missing structures in the input they receive. This is known as the Missing Input Competence Divergence Hypothesis (Rothman, 2007). In order to understand how heritage speakers acquire the minority language, research must determine the relative importance of these three hypotheses and how they affect different grammatical categories. We add to this current discussion by analyzing the production of past tense morphology of heritage speakers of different ages and their parents. When comparing the target production across different age groups, the data will shed light on whether, in this instance, the children undergo incomplete acquisition, L1 attrition or the acquisition of a contact variety with a different tense and aspect system. We implement controlled elicitation methodology to determine more precisely the