Perceived Correctness of Nominal Gender (Dis)Agreement by Heritage Speakers of Spanish

Abstract

This study investigates how quantity of exposure to Spanish as well as early language acquisition affects the ability of adult Spanish heritage speakers to perceive prescriptively (in)correct nominal gender agreement in three-word sequences of a noun with two modifiers. Thirty-six adult speakers of Spanish as a heritage language listened to 116 different three-word sequences, half of which contained prescriptively incorrect gender or number agreement. Participants were asked to determine if the phrase sounded right. Half of the test items were experimental and addressed gender agreement, while the other half were distractors based on number agreement. Furthermore, participants filled out the Bilingual Language Profile (Birdsong et al., 2012) to assess their exposure to and comfort with Spanish. As in many previous studies, participants had more difficulty identifying a prescriptively incorrect stimulus as incorrect than correct stimuli as correct. There was a split between sequential and simultaneous bilinguals: while increased Spanish exposure improved sequential bilinguals’ ability to accurately identify both correct and incorrect stimuli, simultaneous bilinguals only saw gains in their ability to identify correct stimuli.